A game based off of a movie sequel that should have never been made for a franchise that should have never existed. That can sum up my first thoughts when I started playing 3 Ninjas Kick Back. Let’s take a trip back to the early nineties. Ninjas were having a golden age; they filled our arcades, made into cartoons, and all over the movies. 3 Ninjas, in some opinions, was a movie that was transparent cash-in on the ninja craze and offered little aside from being a live action ninja turtle knockoff.

Having never seen a 3 Ninjas movie, I consulted the IMDB for a plot summary to see exactly how close the game came to the movie, to which I can safely assume the term I should use here is “loosely”. Then again, you know what happens to people when they assume. You can choose to play as Rocky, Colt, or Tum-Tum as they battle to take down a childhood rival of their grandfather who he lost some sort of pivotal match against all those years ago. Whatever happened to forgive and forget or acceptance for that matter? Grandpa’s rival calls upon his nephew and his friends to help out and zaniness (read: a path to a dark future of Rogaine abuse due to hair pulling caused by acute frustration) ensues.

While you can choose between any of the three ninjas, they all basically play the same despite having different weapons, though Tum-Tum seems to be a smidge faster then the other two even though that could just as easily be chalked up to him being really small and just looking fast. Rocky fights with a bo staff, Colt got obvious first pickings on the weapons since he fights with a sword, and Tum-Tum fights with a pair of sai. Damage or range don’t seem to differ between them either, so it basically comes down to preference of height or color of your ninja kid.

The game is typical of movie licensed game back in the day, they were all pretty much platformers. You’ll battle through five stages consisting of three sections. You have five lives on hand which you’ll be struggling to hold on to. If you get a game over, you’re sent back to the beginning of the stage and will have to battle through the sections again; there are no saves and no passwords to save you here. Each section’s goals range from reaching the end to collecting or destroying a certain number of items. Along the way you can pick up coins for extra lives, gems and orbs for super happy bonus points, and bombs that don’t seem to do anything special save for falling on the ground next to you. The prerequisite baddies are here in full force as you’ll be taking on a number of ninjas, birds, campfires (campfires?!), and the associates of your grandfather’s childhood foe.

The gameplay is surprisingly passable, though there are certain points in which the difficulty gets ridiculous. Controls are also a little clunky and go from unresponsive to loose, depending on the situation you’re faced with. The control issue becomes apparent when you attempt to grab onto the many swinging vines you encounter in the first couple of chapters. In addition to attacking and jumping, you’ll also be able to climb across tree branches, grab ledges and swing on top of them, and crawl through small spaces. You also have a sort of ultimate attack that you can perform by pressing the jump and attack buttons at the same time. Your weapons are grossly underpowered which will result in some cheap chips out of your life bar and add to the frustration factor quite a bit. While some enemies will go down in one hit, most of the ninjas and other martial artists take about 3 hits each. The teenage nephew and his friends, on the other hand, prove that they’re tougher than common ninjas as they take 10-13 hits each to finally get put away on the game’s normal setting. That’s not just ridiculous, it’s ricockulous. Not to mention the fact that the level design will take any opportunity for enemies to get a cheap shot in on you which will have you reaching for your game genie in no time.

The game’s visuals are definitely the game’s strong point. Though characters seem a little small, they’re all nicely animated and cartoony in a good sort of way. Enemy variety is on the lean side, however. Environments also look nice and offer a lot of neat background art, though some levels, such as the cabin, pale in comparison to the others.

Sound, to be blunt, is horrible. You can tell right from the start by the annoying sound bite that plays when you choose your character. That will be sure to replace what the aliens say in my probing nightmares. Every sound effect is accompanied by a pop before and after which is as annoying as it is unprofessional. Another laughable sound quirk is the fact then when one of your ninja kids, even little Tum-Tum, get killed, you get a grunt that sounds like a man who has been smoking for twenty years as opposed to someone that would fall into that particular age group obviously. I don’t know whose decision that was, but I hope they were mopping the bathrooms after that.

 

Difficulty, control, and sound quirks aside, when I came into this I was expecting pure, unadulterated crap, but what I got was something that I can only describe as unexpectedly acceptable. After reading comments on the movie, I can honestly say that this is one of those rare cases when the game is better than the movie, though not by much.

- Brad Hicks (aka Dr. Swank), SwankWorld Media