I will fully admit that Shinobi Ninja Attacks – Brooklyn to Babylon taught me one thing. Patience. Okay, maybe two things. But I’ll get to those in a bit.

Rating: 12+
Genre: Beat-em-up
Publisher: Shinobi Ninja Videogame LLC
Players: 1
Cost: $3.99
Release Date: January 28, 2010

Link to Shinobi Ninja Attacks on the App Store

BUY

Shinobi Ninja is an actual band. (Whose name ends up meaning Ninja Ninja, but that is amusing and beside the point.) An actual band with an actual MySpace page that wanted to make a actual video game with a story and all that. Cool. No Spice World: The Video Game here! Best part: They do the entire soundtrack. It makes replaying levels actually enjoyable. (Unless you hate hip-hoppish indie rock.)

You can play as any band member, and the story starts out simply enough – You have a set amount of time to make it through a level, and you have to beat up yuppies and subway bums along the way.

It really is this simple.

Walk, jump, and hit. Does it sound like Streets of Rage? It pretty much is. I’ll walk you through a level:

1. Level starts.
2. Punch baddies.
3. Repeat Step 2 about 25 times.
4. Defeat boss.
5. Repeat these four steps three more times, then Game Over.

This is actually the first game I’ve played with an on-screen D-pad, but I think it works the way it’s supposed to. As a whole, the game works entirely well and it’s enjoyable. But, of course, there are a couple of niggling details that I need to go ahead and get out of the way. I’d be a bad reviewer if I didn’t.

That D-pad you see there? Might work better as an on-screen joystick. As is, it covers up quite a bit of space. I found myself trying to fight under it several times every level, and it occasionally covered up some power-ups. I already use it more like a joystick anyway, so why not? If it stays a D-pad, at least make it smaller.

Speaking of power-ups (use them to charge the special meter and unleash a powerful attack that defeats all of your onscreen foes, unless it’s a boss), they don’t stay on the screen very long at all. Sometimes, I can’t pick up the soda can a bad guy drops right away. I’m sorry if I offend the can by not picking it up immediately, or if I offend the police by accidentally breaking a litter law (if the police care that much, why are they not arresting the uncharacteristically violent yuppies? NOTE: The police aren’t in this game), but that’s no reason for it to disappear right before I can get to it. Every. Time.  Same goes for the money the baddies drop. It likes to disappear very quickly. I can manage to pick this stuff up sometimes, but if there’s five guys on me, you can bet that it will have to wait and I’ll lose out.

My biggest enemies here, though, are time and the character motions themselves. Remember when I said this game taught me patience? That’s because I had to play the first level about twenty different times before I actually made it through. It’s not because I’m bad, or because the levels are exceedingly hard – it’s just that whoever decided how much time you get seems to have it timed down to the second. Any level I finished, I didn’t have more than ten seconds left on the clock. Sure, it makes things a little more exciting when it comes down to the wire like that, but I don’t want to give myself a heart attack when I’m playing out in public. Thirty seconds more would make a huge difference.

Each time I ran out of time, I had to start the level over again. In the case of the first level, that meant sitting through thirty seconds of setup that I couldn’t skip. It was a little annoying. (Put a “Skip” button or something there, guys!) When I finally got back to playing, I would vow to go faster every time, but sometimes, when I pressed right to make the character go, it was like he hit a tiny little roadblock. Pressed it a few more times and he would keep going, but I would lose a couple of precious seconds every time. Dunno if there’s lots of gum on the mean streets, but it sure seemed like it.

We can try to go, anyway

To make up for lost time, I’d do one thing: Ignore everything except fighting. There are containers you can hit for power-ups and food. Ignore them unless you accidentally smash one open in the heat of battle. Pick up the money and power-ups you get for defeating baddies and ignore everything else if you want to finish on time. Run out of HP. That’s fine. You don’t have to start the level over unless you’re out of lives, and if you pick up the money, you won’t be. I swear that at one point, I had two lives left, looked up at the counter ten seconds later, and I had six. I don’t know if it was a bug, but I never really had to care if the character died after that. He or she pops back up after a brief break in the music and the butt-kicking resumes, as per usual. Just remember that every second you take to bust open a box is one less second you get to use on a boss.

As far as bosses go, they’re way too easy. Don’t even bother to use your special move on them, just hit them over and over until they go down. No real technique to it, and you can take off twice what the special move does in the same amount of time with normal hits alone (the only real pro to using the special move at the end is that it breaks open all of the onscreen boxes as well, but with items not lasting long, there’s no saving for later).

All in all, those are tiny things that by no means ruin the entire game experience. The game is fun, the soundtrack is awesome (once you finish the game, you can download Shinobi Ninja’s album for free, making the purchase price well worth it to me), and I learned one other thing: If a ninja tries to kick your band out of its venue…just let it happen. Since all of the above problems are easily fixed with an app update (assuming things like the time limit and boss ease are things that Shinobi Ninja want to fix), this one’s an easy buy recommendation from me. Have fun rocking out and kicking butt, and check out the trailer below if you want to see more:

A note: This app was provided for review by Cerulean Games, and that fact does not affect the outcome of this review.

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