Welcome to our review of Save the Ninja clan, a game that takes serious skills to master. Out now on Nintendo Switch!
An evil ninja kidnapped your friends. You must collect scrolls in order to find your friends and save them. You will play as different ninjas as the journey progresses. Each ninja has a different ability: Green Ninja has a double jump, Purple Ninja has a sprint, and the Grey Ninja has a dash (with temporary invincibility).
But above all, this game is not for the casual gamer as it is very punishing despite the really small levels. And despite just restarting from the beginning of the level, this game is hard, to say the least. 19 Retries on just the fourth level? I think there is either something wrong with the way it was set up or I became a really horrible player in 1 minute after starting this game.
Let me explain what I mean. As this is a ninja game, you cross from one side to the other, jumping and skipping, beating enemies along the way and so much more. The jumps need to be very precise as the controls of this game are very accurate, there is not a little leeway in here at all. Just a millimeter too far? Drop down and hope it doesn’t end up killing you.
Along the way, obviously there are also enemies, they tend to attack you and while you can deflect the projectiles thrown at you, you need to kill them to really get rid of em. My favorite death? Jumping into one and managing to throw your own weapon at them, but at a different height, which ends with a double down, you die and so do they.
Moving saws are another one of your first few obstacles and while dying because of one is just about the coolest effect in the game. They are annoying beyond belief. My very first encounter with them, just like level 2 or 3, I literally jumped into one that just appeared out of nowhere. Funny to see it happen, irritating when it happens several times….
Add in a lot more annoyances as I call them, maybe for the record I should call em obstacles, but yeah, I disliked the combination of everything. The lack of a little breathing room, the overly accurate controls, the amount of stuff thrown at you at once, no, I did not like this game at all.
It is also clear this game is marketed towards speedrunners with the clear mention of how long you took to finish a single level. But my question is serious if they will be swayed enough to try. There are several similar games of this genre out there on the eShop and Save the ninja clan might not bring enough to the table to actually try.
In conclusion, despite not liking it personally and the number of stupid deaths I stumbled upon, I doubt it can really be appealing enough to make people buy it, despite its very low buy price of just 3,99 euros. My advice is to check out some gameplay videos and see what you think. For me, it was a bust and my 30% rating reflects this.
