Tuesday 5 February 2013

Ninja Crusaders (NMK 1990)


The whole world is in peril again and who better to save the day than a couple of deadly ninjas. You take control of one of these deadly killing machines and have to travel through five levels of danger before taking on the final boss and restoring peace to the world.

The graphics in Ninja Crusaders are pretty basic, but still not too shabby looking although some of the colour schemes can make it a bit hard to see enemies at times. Most of your adversaries are robots and some of these also have some strange colours like pink for example. At the end of each level you get to face a large boss and some of these are quite hard until you figure out their patterns. The levels, although tough are a bit on the short side and with each level only having two sub levels the game is a little too easily completed for my taste. You have to restart the level upon dying, but biting the dust during a boss battle luckily doesn't place you back at the start of the level. Instead, it only restarts the battle which makes things a bit easier.

 Along the way you get to pick up various ninja weapons like shurikens, katana blades and bo-staffs but I found myself sticking with the shurikens for the duration of the game. Although not as powerful as the short range weapons their range gives you a better chance at eliminating enemies from afar. Interestingly enough, the weapons also enable your ninja to transform into an animal form which is something I didn't even know about until I read the manual. You have no health bar and one shot is all it takes to kill you so it's fortunate that the controls are responsive enough.

The sound in the game is pretty good and for once there are some sound effects that you can actually hear. It's just a pity that some of the enemy's sounds like squeaking mice when they die. Platform games like these are always fun to play, but there's nothing about Ninja Crusaders that really sets it apart from the rest. It's a fun game and you'll enjoy it but if you have a choice I'd say go for something like Shadow of the Ninja. If it was a little bit longer and introduced a bit more variety it could have been better but as it is the game remains largely average. 
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