Reposted with permission from GamesAreEvil.com.
Welcome to the Duel Evil review! Once in a blue moon, Rob and Gabriel will pick up a game for their respective portable systems, and deliver the results of their careful and considered analysis straight to you, the reader with everything. Here’s their colorful and EvilLoaded™ N+ review.
A ninja is a warrior, trained in martial arts, and specializing in a variety of unorthodox arts of war. The methods used by ninja included assassination, espionage, stealth, camouflage, specialized weapons, and a vast array of martial arts. In other words, this guy, right? Not.
In N+, you must guide your little ninja avatar through hundreds of obstacle-filled rooms, collecting keys to open doors and advance to the next level. The obstacles range from little red mines that will detonate on touch to missile launchers that track and follow your every move. There are steeply sloped ramps and tunnels to bizarrely crafted free floating platforms you need to jump up, on, to and from to get to your goal. The goal of each level is two-fold: first, activate the door unlock switch, and second, get to the door and go through. Sounds simple, plays a LOT harder. Finding the switch is hard enough, but it is frequently located through a byzantine maze of curving and looping obstacles, tunnels, and platforms. Many level designs have the old bait and switch technique, where you struggle upward through ever more difficult obstacles to find the activating switch, only to realize that you must go back through the obstacles in reverse to get BACK to the door.
On the Nintendo DS, N+ uses the D pad to move left or right, up and down, and the A of B button to jump. When you die, and you WILL, the X button brings you back to the menu, the Y button has you replay the episode, and the A button allows you to restart the entire level. The top screen shows you the entire environment, shrunk down for an overview. The bottom screen shows you the immediate environment around your ninja dude, for that up-close maneuvering.
O
n the PSP, you use the D pad to move in those same directions. Although this works perfectly, I question the lack of analog nub control. Cross button to jump, and Triangle to commit digital suicide. The only complaint here is that the Start button pauses, so if you accidentally hit it after you die, well……you won’t like it. On the PSP’s beautiful wide screen, you have enough space to see the entire level, with the occasional camera moving up on instances where the level is really big.
Gabe: Hey Rob, I’ve heard complaints that pressing those DS buttons during N+ have caused many a sore thumb. What say you? Did you have this problem?
Rob: Well, if pressing buttons over and over and over and over and over DOESN’T hurt your thumb after a while, you’d be the freak of nature that we all believe you to be.
On the PSP, I had a few issues with the presentation of the game. First of all, the menu screen takes quite a while to load. After I got into the actual game, the graphics seemed a little sub-par for my taste. I wasn’t expecting it to be Live Arcade quality, but it seems just a little too square. Also, the sounds were just…bad. Heck, I wouldn’t expect this sound quality on a SNES game. There are generic electronic beats, and then there are horrifying loops that make you want to pull your hair out. We kept it on mute for a good long time, noting that there really was no advantage to having the music on. Fortunately, the game allows you to turn off the music, but keep on the sounds. You know, so you can hear your exploded body parts shrapnel around the level better.
Gabe: The game play itself is a blast. I haven’t seen a truer “platformer” in a good long time. This takes me back to the days when timing jumps was more important than pretty graphics or deep combat systems. If you haven’t realized it yet, this game is *tough*. I’ve played levels on which I’ve died over 400 times. Your reflexes will be tested, and if you hesitate so much as a second, expect to see ninja-chunks all over the place moments later. While some find the extreme difficulty exciting, others may just get angry and throw their oh-so-delicate PSP 2000′s against a wall.
Rob: All the stuff I don’t like about platformers is the actual POINT of this game. The gameplay itself is a frustrating exercise in frustrating frustration. Seriously, at least Mario has cuteness and Sonic has speed and Earthworm Jim has cow launching. This game, however, has different colored ninjas, and you might actually unlock a “victory animation” if you’re lucky. This is all the twitch-based, split-second timing that keeps me from truly enjoying tricky platformers in general, distilled into one game.
In addition to the 300 single player levels packed on disc, you can play special co-op levels with your friends using the PSP’s Ad-hoc feature. While this is welcome, I feel disappointed with the lack of Infrastructure co-op. On the DS, you can also auto-find a game to play with other people and the incredibly arcane and difficult levels that they seem bent on producing. Think the single-player levels are hard? Try completing a level built by a fan of this kind of gameplay, and you may actually throw the console.
If all those levels still aren’t doing it for you, why don’t you make your own? Many other people already have. N+ comes with a level creator so you can construct to your hearts delight. While it works just fine, I found it hard to simply jump in and start building. Got no imagination? Then you can play the levels created by the rest of the N+ community. I’ll admit, they’re not all winners, but some of them are just plain amazing. you can download the single player or co-op community levels straight to your Memory Stick, so you don’t have to worry about having no levels you like to play without a wi-fi connection nearby.
The Verdict: Rent it First
We can’t think of a portable title more jam-packed with content than N+. There are three hundred single player levels, and an infinite amount of community content. That being said, there’s something wrong with N+ for everything good about it. While it does have a ridiculous amounts of re-playability in the form of user-created levels and online play, some might not enjoy its reflex-intensive game play in the first place. It has the low-pixel count and presentation of a Game Boy Advance game, and sounds like something an Super Nintendo fan might turn her nose up at.
If you eat Legendary for breakfast and Master Ninja for lunch, than consider N+ your afternoon snack. The difficulty may make you shout and want to kill people, but it’ll be that much more satisfying when you beat it. For you, the baddest of the bad, the most hardcore of the hardcore, the $20 asking price will be totally worth it. If you get frustrated easily, or generally don’t like being blown to smithereens thousands of times, you should stay far away.
If you enjoy twitch-based game play where timing and the ability to hit a button perfectly is the sole reason for playing, we’d recommend buying this game. Otherwise, you might thing on renting it, so you might find out, as Rob did, that you actually do NOT like this kind of game. The sound and relative lack of gameplay depth (it’s really the same thing, over and over, folks) might make you me stop playing it after only a few frustrating hours, glad you didn’t spend $20 on it.
Popularity: unranked [?]
