Save the Ninja Clan

When you hear the word ninja, you probably imagine a nimble fighter who is both quick and stealthy. But that's not how I would describe the heroes at the center of Save the Ninja Clan, the brand new action game from a first time developer named Willz. The ninjas here are clumsy and bumbling, nothing like what you see in the movies. The result is a disappointing effort that spits in the face of everything you know and love about ninjas. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Save the Ninja Clan is not a good game.

There's a story here, but only in the loosest sense of the word. An evil ninja has kidnapped all your friends, so it's up to you to, well, save the ninja clan. The idea is to collect a bunch of scrolls in a mad dash to find your friends and take down the evil-doers. It's just enough of a motivation to get you into 30 stages of annoying platforming puzzles.

From time to time, you can see the glimpse of a good game hiding behind all the crummy decisions. The main gimmick is that you can switch between three different ninjas, each with their own specialty. For example, the green ninja is able to double jump, the purple ninja can run and the red ninja can teleport through objects. You'll be able to get away with only using the green ninja for the first few stages, but will need to swap between the different characters to complete the later levels.

On paper, this sounds like my ideal game. I love ninjas and I love 2D platformers, so what could possibly go wrong? As it turns out, pretty much everything can (and did) go wrong. Save the Ninja Clan is the type of action game that isn't frustrating because it's difficult, but rather because it's barely playable. This is an absolute mess of a platformer that seems to ignore the last thirty years of video game progress.

When I say that Save the Ninja Clan is barely playable, what I mean is that the gameplay is a complete train wreck. It's this frustrating combination of being slippery and unresponsive, the two things you never want to see in a 2D platformer. The stages aren't hard because of the layout, but rather because you're always fighting the control. If this handled like Super Meat Boy, N++ or dozens of other platformers, I would have been able to beat this game in mere minutes. But since nothing works right, you'll spend hours falling into bottomless pits because of the imprecise gameplay.

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It doesn't help that the stage designs are pedestrian, at best. Look, I've seen a lot of 2D platformers at this point. If you review enough retro-inspired games, then you're bound to see a whole bunch of platformers that do exactly the same thing. There's nothing original there, to the point where I was able to guess each new wrinkle they introduced well ahead of time. This is a paint-by-numbers platformer with terrible controls and amateurish graphics. There are so many better games like this on the market.

If you need me to come up with a positive, then I'll say that I like the bonus content. Every level has some sort of glitch you can exploit to discover new parts of the game. This is an interesting conceit that is occasionally handled well. There are times when you'll be able to skip the puzzle entirely by using the ninja abilities, which seems to confuse the simulation. These moments hint at what could be a much more interesting game, but instead we're left with a frustrating platformer with terrible graphics and even worse gameplay.

Even at $4, Save the Ninja Clan feels expensive. This is an aggressively mediocre action game with almost nothing new to bring to the table. The gameplay is slippery and unresponsive, to the point where I wondered if there was something wrong with my game pad. To make matters worse, the thirty stages are short and wholly unoriginal. In a world where better ninja games and platformers exist, there's absolutely no reason to Save the Ninja Clan.