Fearless Ninja is a casual arcade game from Box Shaped Games (Max Injury + Max Injury 2). You will play as a ninja who needs to kill as many enemies as possible by collecting blue orbs that let you attack them, trying to get the highest score you can.
The graphics and animations in Fearless Ninja are done pretty well. The animations for attacking, movement, and the enemies is all top notch, while the background of the game looks nice. There is no variation in the environments though, and you’ll only see a couple of different enemies in the game until you get reasonably good. The variation with enemies is nice, but it would have been better if different enemies came out of the woodwork earlier in the game. Even playing on Easy, it took me 2 days before I saw the 3rd enemy.
The controls are done well, giving you a tap option, which lets you use the corners of the screen kind of like arrows, tapping on the bottom right to move the ninja right, and left to move left, and a swipe control that’s still kind of hard to be precise with, swiping in the direction you want to move, making moving while attacking a difficult task.
Enemies are spawned about halfway up the screen, and bounce along the ground, making you weave and dodge through them while trying to get to the blue orbs that come down from the sky as well. The orbs send you into an attacking flip where you can either run into enemies, or bounce off of them, chaining together combos for bigger and better groups of points. The more enemies you kill before touching the ground, the bigger your score.
The main enemies only need one hit in order to be killed, but occasionally, a more powerful enemy will bounce across the screen, and need 4 hits. These enemies that need more hits are great for bouncing on, killing all the one hit enemies in the process, shooting your combo score through the roof. There are also scrolls that drop once you hit a certain amount of points, and collecting them lets you use a power-up. To start off, you’ll get a tornado attack, which lets you spin up into the air, and then float there for a second, hitting enemies as they spawn, and then floating back down to the ground. If you store these power-ups, and another scroll falls, you’ll get some added health, which can really help extend your game quite a bit. You’re given 4 hits on your health bar before you die, so saving up the power-ups until you really need them is rewarded well.
GameCenter has leader boards for each of the 3 difficulties, Easy, Medium, and Hard, as well as a leader boards for how many enemies you’ve killed in one play-through on each difficulty, and one Ninja Score leader board, which is calculated from your Easy, Medium, and Hard scores to rank every player. There is plenty of variety once you get conformable with the game to push the fact that there is no change in the environment to the back of your mind. Different enemies and power-ups coupled with getting the best combo you can to drive your score up will be your main focus. For $0.99, and Universal, Fearless Ninja is a great casual arcade game that will also fit well on any hardcore gamers iDevice. The challenge is high, but like most high-scoring arcade games, the replay value is higher, and once you feel like you’ve mastered the game, it’ll still be able to beat up on you. Hopefully more modes will be added in the future to help give the game a bit more variety, but as it is now, it’s definitely worth the price of admission. If you’re still curious, you can check out the game for free on the developer’s website, inside the Unity player.
Fearless Ninja gets a score of 7 out of 10.
Links;
Website – http://www.boxshapedgames.com/fearless/