"This game screams "passable"."

3 Ninjas Kick Back was a Family movie from 1994 directed by Charles T. Kanganis. It was bad in every aspect. 3 Ninjas Kick Back was also an Action game from 1994. It was also bad.

We all know that movie games rarely seem to work. This is odd considering the developers would have an entire world, set of characters and ideas to put into a game, relieving creative pressure. That's not very artistic but still it's true. Simply, this game is a cliche side-scrolling action game with minimal thought involved.

Loosely following the story of the movie, Victor Wong takes the three "ninjas" through a series of tests before he heads off to Japan. All three "ninjas" from the film; Colt, Rocky and "Tum Tum" are all here with little difference between them, making character selection a rather pointless endeavor. I guess the point here is to appeal to fans of the film.

Anyways, the gameplay is frustrating in that attacking, jumping, and moving altogether through various obstacles is rough. All three characters have very little attack range, opening them up for plenty of attacks whether it be from one-hit kill boulders, renegade angry birds or Grandpa himself. By the way, the Grandpa is supposedly too old to fiddle around with the kids for training yet through all the frustrating obstacles, he likes to suddenly appear through a cloud of smoke and lob some shurikens at you from a distance or fight you hand-to-hand if you approach him.

There are several items, which can allow you to shoot projectiles at the enemy until you get hit (which won't last long), kill all enemies on screen in a blazing fire, or give you fuse bombs. The lit fuse bombs plop out of the character and explode when they hit the enemy. You can carry a limited selection of these.

The movement of the characters are not very responsive and through all the boulders and things you must be dodging, and all of the enemies you must quickly turn around to, it makes things a bit frustrating. You can drop down platforms, jump up onto branches and platforms with a flip and hang onto swinging ropes to avoid pits. However it's very easy to mess up the ropes and fall into a pit, leaving your character to bop around in the spikes getting hurt on each landing until you get to safe landing. There's also the mysterious bonfires, which can ignite your character, hurting him constantly until it wears off, there's no way to shrug it off. However, your character can shoot or hit this fire and make it explode...?

Attacking with the characters is not very smooth either, you get a pretty short range no matter who you are. More attack directions and maybe more attacks (forget that lame jump kick) could have helped things.

Levels aren't always arranged in a side-scroller style, some of them are platform upon platform and some of them are "chases".

And finally, the sound is pretty obnoxious...the characters seem to be masochists considering they scream "YEAH!" when they get hit. The soundtrack is full of ringy clattery ninja-like tunes which don't do anything for anything.

The challenge of the game is trying to deal with the frustrating controls, putting up with the bad soundtrack and trying to get over how corny it is. There's nothing really redeeming about this game. It's not extremely terrible, but it's not okay either. There's no reason to play this game, and in this day and age you shouldn't even have an urge to play it.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 12/13/05