It's a game themed after the NES Ninja Gaidens that's tough but fair the whole way through. The level design is quite good, and with infinite lives and fairly frequent checkpoints it rides the line of being tough but manageable quite well, with the traditional NES style difficulty of tough bits buffered by easier bits with appropriate levels of midlevel health to keep you going without the NES style bullshit. It starts a little rough, with an anemic life bar and nothing but your sword, but around stage 3 you start getting a lot more upgrades and the game starts pulling punches without going totally easy on you before ramping up gradually.
The game has a weird sort of setup where each level is connected into one big world, but you only have fast travel at stage transitions and none of the bosses respawn so all that is good for is occasionally going back to a few worlds with new powers for upgrades you missed.
As you proceed the game hands you powers, shurikens, pogo jumps, and eventually at the halfway mark a dash and a parry. The dash is contentious for good reason; The dash first needs to be reconfigured to whatever your muscle memory used for a DKC or Mario run as the double tap is the wrong binding. Second, once you get the dash, the platforming starts expanding out the X-axis to make use of your speed, but any attack while dashing is a teleport dash strike that, sometimes, gives you a lot of flexibility in movement and attack but, most of the time, sends you plummeting onto spikes. This stays aggravating to the end credits and I feel that the game would have been better off focusing on the core default speed movement platforming but the game is 3-5 hours long so I guess we needed a change by that point. The parry allows you to, if you tap the d-pad toward the attack at the right time, reflect any projectile. This move is vital for most encounters through the rest of the game. It's a little annoying when you whiff it but it is otherwise manageable.
The game also includes a wide variety of clever cheevos rewarding you for doing parts of the game fairly stylishly but, I'm going to be honest here, a good chunk of them are pretty ridiculous. For instance, one asks you to clear the first level without killing a single enemy. Obnoxious enough because enemies will not despawn if you simply scroll past them but then it requires damage tanking tech to get past a couple of midboss enemies without being knocked back for longer than your invulnerability lasts. Sure, this is clever, but it is not remotely fun. Fortunately these are all just optional but still a little insulting that you are asked to do something so asinine.
Through all this is a fairly elaborate story of ninjas fighting robots and trying to stop a scientist (who did nothing wrong) from saving his daughter. The writing is not an afterthought but it does not waste your time. Plus the music and art are great too.
By the last act of the game I was really itching for it to end as the game started going hard on the stunt platforming over spikes and instant kill pits while swarms of robots stalk you but at the end of it all I had fun. While it was tough, the checkpoints were generous enough to soothe the pain and the game carefully avoided throwing too much obnoxious nonsense at you. I've never played a NES Ninja Gaiden and I don't think any of them have been as fair as this game. To that end, I recommend this game for anyone in the market for tough, classic platforming. This game is hugely underrated for what it is. For a dollar to quality and dollar to hour value, this game is absolutely top tier. The dev put far more work in it than needed and deserves great praise for that.
