Score: 4.5/13

Written by Johnny Clapham

There was a time around the seventies and eighties, and possibly the nineties, when ninjas were cool. This was a time when they were either mysterious assassins striking silently from the shadows, or sewer dwelling amphibians with a penchant for pizza and saying “dude a lot”. Today, they (along with pirates and monkeys) have been reduced to lazy punchlines and jokes, told by those who think that ninjas and their ilk are ‘lol totally random.’
What has that little rant got to do with Ninja Blade? Well if we were to place Ninja Blade into one of those categories, it would most definitely be in the latter.
After almost a year, Ninja Blade finally drags itself from the 360 to the PC, stinking of port more than a 19th century sailor with no new additions to be seen. For starters, if you’re thinking of playing this game with the keyboard and mouse – forget it! It is just far too fiddly, and one of those times when you do actually need a gamepad.
What makes it worse is; not only is this a lazy port, but it seems that the only new feature the PC version of Ninja Blade has to offer is a whole variety of glitches and technical cock-ups. While they aren’t game breaking, they are certainly annoying, with inconsistent frame-rates during combat and audio occasionally cutting out.

OK, its obvious that the game does not take itself too seriously (pink pinstripes are the ideal mutant killing clothes, you know), and while over-the-top madness can be fun, it’s not nearly as fun when there is such a derivative game behind it.
Yes there are some bat-shit insane moments, such as surfing on a missile through the skies and totally ignoring all laws of physics on a motorcycle, but these moments have been reduced to that old favourite of lazy game design: the QTE.
To be fair, QTE’s can be implemented creatively in other games, but sadly that is not the case here,


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About the game

When a small village was attacked by strange creatures known as Alpha-worms, some of the villagers were infected and started to turn into mutants. Fearing the situation could worsen and result in an outbreak, the military were forced to sterilize the site. They assaulted the facility and destroyed all traces of the infected and the Alpha-worms. To prevent panic, governments of the world kept the Alpha-worms secret. There have been contained outbreaks of infection over the years, but all have been stopped by the G.U.I.D.E. squad. The government was confident that they could control the spread of Alpha-worms – until now.
You play as Ken Ogawa, a member of the elite squad charged with stopping the spread of the infection.