NinjaBoy Not Big Enough For His Gi's Britches
NinjaBoy ($0.99) by 2 Ton Studios isn’t as exciting as you think it would be.
Tadeo is a young ninja in need of stopping the evil Lord Hito. However, instead of running around, swinging a sword and flinging throwing stars, you just jump around a lot and try to avoid trip lines. It’s not as exciting as Sprint:Challenge.
Before you begin your adventure you are shown the basics through a couple of tutorial levels. You control Tadeo by tilting your iDevice and tapping the screen to jump. The main skill to walk away with is being able to jump up and out to reach a platform parallel with the one you’re standing on.
The tutorial levels are so quick that they can be finished in seconds.
After that, you move on to the dojo, with the actual levels. The goal for each level is to collect all three stars and a key, if needed for locked exit doors. You won’t immediately come across any bad guys, and when you do, they are just walking jade statues that will catch you if you’re in their line of sight.
The game looks like it misses some finishing touches. For example, any time you die or get caught the screen just turns black and resets. No dying animation or sounds.
While the tilt controls are fine-tuned, they unfortunately aren’t used for much action. One thing I was looking for in the game was being able to climb up by jumping back and forth between two walls, such as in Kung Fu Rabbit (though I guess this would be a little tricky with tilt controls).
You may want to wait for this NinjaBoy to be a NinjaMan.
