Ninja Shodown

I'll be straight with you: I looked at Ninja Shodown the way I look at a game that has no ranked mode, no online play, and a six-mode menu that mostly means the same thing with different point conditions. Then someone plugged in three controllers and suddenly I was screaming at a screen. That's the entire arc of this game, and whether it's worth your money depends entirely on which part of that sentence applies to your Friday night. Bitmap Bureau built this around single-screen arena combat with one-hit kills, a dodge roll that doubles as a self-destruct button, and a limited shuriken count that you have to physically pick back up from the floor after a miss. Your loadout is a katana at close range, those shurikens at distance, and whatever drops out of the crates - bombs, machine guns, shotguns, bazookas. The weapon pickups are where things get unpredictable in the best way. One round you are a sword purist, the next someone rockets themselves off a platform in Area 88 and the lobby erupts. The TTK (time-to-kill) is instant, literally one hit, which makes every engagement a read-your-opponent-or-die situation rather than a prolonged duel. That is either your thing or it is not. The six modes - Last Ninja, Battle, Coin, Crown, Arcade, and Infinite - sound more substantial than they play. Last Ninja and Battle are last-man-standing variants. Coin has you cracking golden cat statues open and banking currency while trying not to die and drop ten coins to whoever kills you. Crown is the most interesting of the lot: hold the crown, score a point per second, and you can toggle whether the crown-holder can fight back at all. These versus modes are the reason to be here. Arcade mode sends you through five-round gauntlets across five locations - Temple, Dojo, Downtown, Museum, Area 88 - but the solo experience is brutally unforgiving and the enemy AI is about as smart as a wave of Pac-Man ghosts. Armored enemies start appearing early and the difficulty spikes hard with no checkpoints, which is not the kind of challenge that feels fair so much as arbitrary. Infinite mode is the same idea but endless, and it runs dry fast when played alone. The thing reviewers across the board kept landing on - and I agree - is that there is no online multiplayer whatsoever. Local co-op and local versus only, full stop. For a PC game releasing in 2017 that is a significant omission. If your setup is a gaming den where people physically show up, Ninja Shodown punches well above its weight class for the chaos it generates per session. The pixel art is clean, the retro techno soundtrack by Matt Gray has genuine energy, and the controls are responsive enough that deaths feel earned after you learn the timing of the dodge. If your usual play is solo or online, this is a hard sell at any price and an honest skip. Fred, Scout Team