Doggie Ninja The Burning Strikers

Genre: Sports (Soccer)

Players: 1-4 Team Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Doggie Ninja The Burning Strikers is a family-friendly, silly, cartoony game of Soccer that has you playing the sport as cutesey dog ninjas. This game was released on Nintendo Switch in 2020.

The presentation here is decent, with simple fields (laid out more like enclosed arenas), chibi-esque 3D characters, and frenetic and energetic music. It’s nothing that’s even remotely impressive in any way, but it’s at least visually appealing.

As for the gameplay, the good news here is that the mechanics of this game are solid, making it very clear and simple how to steal, pass, shoot at the goal, and even hold down the shot button to power up a “kamehameha”-style shot that goes farther and breaks through the goal’s defenses. Ah yes, that – this game doesn’t have traditional teams and goalies, with teams consisting of only one or two players each, and the goalies here represented by force fields that need to be busted down. This simplification of the sport actually works quite well, allowing players to focus on the straightforward action, maneuvering around opponents, and coordinating with your teammate for the ultimate assist.

And that brings me to the game’s flaws. See, the computer-controlled players in this game are just terrible. In my very first game, I beat the computer-controlled players 14-1 without even breaking a sweat. There’s no way to select the opponents’ difficulty, unfortunately. At the very least, your teammate seems to respond appropriately when you charge up for an assist shot on the goal, but otherwise computer-controlled players are slow, their movement often nonsensical, and they even get stuck on scenery fairly frequently.

At the very least this game does have a lot of promise in 4-player multiplayer mode, where you needn’t worry about bad AI. Sadly, here things are brought down a little by a lack of content – the game has a good selection of characters to play, but aside from different stats there’s little that’s unique about them. And even though this game seems like it’d be ideal for all sorts of wacky arenas, there’s only three to choose from. There’s not even online multiplayer for players to fill in slots if they have an odd number of players and don’t want to be saddled with AI players.

It’s frustrating that Doggie Ninja The Burning Strikers has such severe problems with AI and a lack of content, because the core gameplay here is absolutely delightful. If you can get exactly four players together, The Burning Strikers promises to be a fun, accessible representation of the sport of soccer that’s well worth playing. Just don’t expect a ton of variety and definitely don’t play with computer-controlled players if you can help it.

tl;dr – Doggie Ninja The Burning Strikers is a family-friendly, cutesey, simplified version of the sport that has players kicking the ball around as chibi-ified dog ninjas. The gameplay here is actually really fun, and well worth playing in 4-player mode. Unfortunately, you won’t want to play without company, because the AI players are absolutely terrible. There’s also a disappointing lack of content. However, if you’re looking for a simple Soccer game to play with three friends, this is still definitely worth a look.

Grade: C+

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