Game title: Mini Ninjas
Franchise: Mini Ninjas
Developer: IO Interactive
Publisher: Eidos Interactive
Platform: Xbox 360 (played on Xbox One)
Original release date: September 8th 2009

What is the Game?

Mini Ninjas is an action-adventure game which focuses on the character of Hiro, a ninja who must use Kuji magic to defeat the evil samurai Ashida. Along the way, Hiro finds various scrolls and companions to aid him on his journey. The scrolls give him a range of different Kuji magic techniques to use, such as tornadoes and possessing animals.

What are my thoughts?

This is one of the games which I have actually played before, albeit briefly on a kiosk Xbox 360 in the play area of a pub in the very early 2010s. I considered disqualifying it because of that, however it's been long enough that I can't remember anything about the game, plus I was around 5-7 at the time, so I decided to play it. As for my current thoughts, it's a very okay game. The controls are pretty decent and it (mostly feels satisfying to move). I do think that it became a bit clunky when trying to do some things involving walls, however it overall wasn't bad. I also don't really like the hat boat controls and found it really hard to steer. Maybe that's because I was pushing forward so I was going faster, but it could've definitely been better explained in the tutorial. The combat was fine, just your standard action-adventure combat with a heavy attack and a light attack and that's about it. The magic was pretty fun to use, but it was still a bit clunky and kinda poorly explained. This was especially true with the fireball and tornado spells as I found them to be pretty difficult to aim, and even missed on the tornado at least once because of this. The amount of buttons and menus in the game concerned me at first that it would be a bit overwhelming, but it wasn't too bad besides the occasionally RB instead of LB press and vice versa. Graphically, it looked fine during gameplay and I liked the stylization, but it looked really bad in the cutscenes, especially during the close-up shots. Sure it's great that it's not distracting in-game, but it sucks that it ruins the cutscenes a bit. The other characters were quite disappointing as they just played almost exactly like Hiro but with different special abilities and without the use of magic. I still tried them out, but there wasn't much point when I'd just end up switching back to Hiro anyway to use magic within a few seconds. Overall, this was a very okay game. I didn't dislike it, but it wasn't amazing. Maybe I'd play it again to beat it, but not something I'd go back to often.

My score: 6/10
Will I play it again?: Maybe to beat it.

Gameplay video:

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