Ninja Assault

"It Wasn't A Dream? Noooo!"

Light gun games are on the edge of extinction from the gaming world, and you can thank games like Ninja Assault for leading to it. It’s been over six years since the Sega Saturn set the standard for light gun games with Virtua Cop 2, hands down the best light gun game we may ever see. Over the following years we see fewer and fewer light gun games, and only a rare few becoming something worthwhile such as Playstation 2’s Vampire Night, and most recently Xbox’s House of the Dead III. With such sparse games in its genre you’d probably expect each title to perhaps try to breathe new life into the bloodline; unfortunately playing Ninja Assault is about as fun as having your tongue tied to a tailpipe and being dragged naked across a field of broken glass.

In fact Ninja Assault is so bad I really don’t know where to begin, being there isn’t really anything good about it, period. The first problem comes with the Playstation 2’s horrible gun, the Gun-Con 2. Not only is it terribly uncomfortable, but it’s so small and light-weight that I felt like I was holding a cheap squirt gun from Dollar World, the kind I’d buy as a kid and break within an hour. When I finally got into the game and was traveling through the first few levels, the game was so muggy and sluggish I couldn’t even tell if I was hitting the enemies. In fact, for awhile I even thought my gun wasn’t working, when I found out it was, I was even more stunned.

To try and compensate for the lackluster light-gun experience, I tried the old fashioned cursor shooting using a normal PS2 controller. Surprisingly Namco added in an auto-aim to the game than enabled me to lock onto every enemy without even trying, which literally killed any challenge Ninja Assault would’ve provided. I also have to mention how ugly the game is. For awhile I couldn’t even tell if it was a PSone game since it easily could pass for one. Any PS2 owner looking for a light-gun game would be a fool to pick up Ninja Assault. I highly suggest you pick up the far more entertaining Vampire Night instead. Ninja Assault is a poor excuse for a game and if these ninja’s had any honor, they’d kill themselves, I sure wanted to after playing this.

Graphics- 4.0
Gameplay- 3.0
Sound- 4.0
Overall- 3.5

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 07/04/03, Updated 07/04/03