Arcade Archives Ninja-Kid

Genre: Action-Platformer / Arcade

Players: 1-2 (Local Alternating), Online Leaderboards

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Review:

Ninja-Kid is an Arcade-style Action-Platformer originally released in Japan only in 1984 in arcades. This modern release sees the game coming to PlayStation 4 in 2015 and Nintendo Switch in 2018.

Ninja-Kid is a vertical-scrolling Action-Platformer, with players jumping up and down a series of platforms to take out enemies while avoiding their attacks. It’s simple but can be satisfying once you get the hang of it, but there are a few issues. First, the game doesn’t give players any way to jump straight up, which is odd given the game’s vertical nature. Trying to do so will instead see you jumping down a platform instead, which can be frustrating. Even more frustrating is how unreliable your attacks are here, with the shuriken you toss sometimes not appearing at all. This can be especially frustrating when you need to toss these out to fend off an enemy’s attack, which instead sees no resistance and just kills you.

This release of the game includes a new “Hi-Score Mode” that challenges players to score as much as they can in one run before seeing a game over screen. There is also a new “Caravan Mode” that does much the same, but with the limit being five minutes. In addition, this release of the game includes various display options, sound options, challenge modifiers, button mapping, and online leaderboards.

Overall, Ninja-Kid has some decent classic appeal in its design, but its clunky, unwieldy, and unreliable gameplay outweighs any charm that classic design may have had. I don’t recommend this game.

tl;dr – Ninja-Kid is an Arcade-style vertical-scrolling Action-Platformer that has players taking out enemies as a ninja. There’s some appeal in this game’s retro design, but it can’t overcome poor controls with unreliable attacks. Skip this one.

Grade: C-

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