You are a ninja riding a hoverbike shooting stars and knives at bugs and other weird critters in Ninpo Blast.  It’s a super simple vertically scrolling shooter and is available on all current consoles and PC, but reviewed on PS4 here.

Controls are simple.  Move around with the L stick and hold down the X button to fire ninja stars, that go in a three way pattern.  If you press the square button, you’ll shoot out knives that go straight forward.  A little circle will appear around your ninja and when it’s full, you can press the triangle button to use a screen clearing bomb.  Sometimes when enemies are defeated, they’ll drop gears.  Collect these and use them to buy upgrades in the shop after you run out of energy and die.

In the shop, you can buy upgrades for your shots, like power, speed, and rate of fire.  Although I didn’t notice much difference after I upgraded a few times.  You can also upgrade your ninja to have more health and make the bomb circle recover faster.  Some upgrades are purely cosmetic and include different stage backgrounds and rides for your ninja.  Only problem is it takes a very long time to get the upgrades, which makes playing the game a bit repetitive.  And there’s not much variety in the gameplay anyway. This is the first in a series of Tiny Pixel games, so hopefully I’ll get to review more of them and they’ll have more games I like.  Such as maybe a game where you run around a maze eating dots or something.

Kid Factor:

Ninpo Blast is rated E for Everyone with an ESRB descriptor of Mild Fantasy Violence.  You shoot knives and throwing stars at bugs and other cartoony aliens and everyone just explodes when defeated.  Reading skill isn’t needed, but younger gamers may have trouble with the difficulty.

Tags: Game Reviews