Genre: Strategy
Developer: Venan Entertainment
Publisher: SouthPeak Interactive
Players: 1-2
Retail Price: $20
Availability: Nintendo DS
If you were a horribly mean person, shoved a Ninjatown ninja to the ground, and saw that ninja explode into tears, you would probably stop acting all hard and tough and proceed to curl into a ball and hope to stop living.
Now, you might think that’s over the top, but you’ll change your mind after taking a look at one of these little guys. Oozing cuteness prevails in Ninjatown, from the town’s resident ninjas to the waddling bad guys, who want to steal the recipe for Ninjatown’s sugary cookies, add their evil syrup to the mix, and distribute the delectable treats around the world.
But while your first thought about the whole shebang might be “this is cute,” rest assured that we’re not talking about la-la-la, finger-in-your-mouth cute. Rather, we’re talking about fun-loving, 18-to-24-year-old-demographic cute, the kind that’s a refreshing deviation from the rough-and-tough-with-unnecessary-gore artistic style reminiscent of way too many offerings these days. Ninjatown’s art is visually appealing, backed by a unique brand of cuteness that’ll have your big loving heart gushing in no time. And it certainly helps that the game’s presentation is backed up by some genuinely witty humor, the kind of cheeky and subversive but friendly and, yes, adorable wisecracking that can be instantly appreciated.
Ninjatown happens to be a lot of fun to play, too. It’s essentially a tower defense game, but rather than styling itself as a hardcore offering with a massive learning curve – some gamers see tower defense as a puzzlingly arcane genre – it presents its version of tower defense quite accessibly. If, like me, you’ve never played a tower defense game, consider making this one your introduction to the genre: Ninjatown’s game mechanics are clear and straightforward, so you won’t have any trouble getting started. You’ll breeze through the introductory phase of the game like a pro; after the first couple of missions, you might be rooting for the game to go harder on you.
The good news is that you’ll get your wish. Although the game begins simply, with one type of enemy and two types of ninja huts (huts are your “towers” that spawn ninjas to fight the bad guys), you’re steadily introduced to different types of enemies and ninjas. That’s what gives this game depth, and it’s your ability to use the different types of ninja huts in harmony that brings you to riches or ruin. The name of the game is balance: Not only do you have to build the right defense at the right time, but you also have to build the right mix of defenses to contend with the various enemies you’ll encounter. You’ll usually face only around three types of monsters throughout any given level, but that number is certainly enough to keep you off balance, often luring you to build too many Wee Ninja huts (Wee Ninjas are the bread-and-butter melee unit) and suddenly informing you that you’ll soon be greeted by winged baddies, when you’ll need to scramble to build your ranged defenses to an adequate level. It’s a system that keeps you on your toes and forces you to be sharp with your strategic wit – a system that is, in short, pretty damn enjoyable.
Admirably, the game’s difficulty is mostly fair and organic – there’s little cheapness going on. Rather than creating difficulty by dumping ridiculously overpowered monsters into the level who will simply barrel through your defenses, the game will more frequently make your life hard through clever level design. The offshoot is that instead of getting frustrated when you fail, you immediately become an enthusiastic critic of your own performance. You’ll be eager to see how you can build your huts in more effective locations, how you can balance building more huts with the need to upgrade your ninjas, and how you can spend your sparse cookies in the most efficient manner (cookies are the currency with which you buy all of your structures and unit upgrades – cute, right?).
The key word in the phrase “sparse cookies,” by the way, is “sparse.” It’s not that the game is stingy, because it’s important for the sake of balance that you don’t have a obesity-inducing stream of cookies to expend, lest the game artificially becomes far too easy. The thing is that the tight control of currency, fair and appropriate as it may be, acts like the annoying cop killing the party: The party was fun, but it wasn’t everything it could’ve been. In the same vein, with Ninjatown you’ll gradually amass a satisfyingly diverse array of ninjas you can summon, which is great – except for the fact that you don’t really get a chance to use all of them as much as you’d like. The Mountain Ninja, for example, is a blast to use because he’s so powerful, but it’s so expensive to make a Mountain Ninja hut that you rarely get to build one anyway. White Ninjas slow enemies with frigid snowballs, but they frequently don’t give you enough bang for your cookie (har har), especially when enemies are coming down the pipe so quickly that you’re forced to sacrifice hut variety for an uninspired but gets-the-job-done selection of huts.
While not a killjoy, something else that’s a bit annoying is the fact that it’s tough to drastically alter your mix of huts after you’ve already invested in certain types of ninjas. It’s hard to be pleased when you’ve got a nice defense to deal with certain types of enemies, when suddenly the game tells you that you need to dump your current huts for new ones to fight off a vastly different wave of baddies. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing, except for the fact that you usually only get to see incoming enemies one or two waves into the future. By the time you know you have to overhaul your defenses, often you won’t be able to drum up enough cookies to buy yourself some new real estate. Thus, you lose once the bad guys blitz through your woefully inadequate defenses. That said, you’ll have to put up with a bit of trial-and-error gameplay.
Don’t take that criticism of Ninjatown as a full-on shove, though; I don’t want any Ninjatown ninjas tearing up. Treat it more like a little push – minor inconveniences. For all the game’s sugary cuteness, Ninjatown does a handsome job maintaining the sugar high, keeping up the trend of frequently exhilarating missions. No need to shove here – this one’s pretty sweet.
