Screenshots :.
N+
360
Jay
27-03-2008
"Ninja + Rocket = Gibbed."
"Gold locked behind doors? Story of a ninjas life in this game."
"Well that looks familiar..."
With my latest PSP incursions, praising the handheld for obtaining some decent titles, the ability to grab old arcade classics on your top-notch next-gen console shouldn’t be any less overlooked. The amount of times we’ve grabbed a demo only to then get the full thing within minutes has been astonishing. Whether this can be put down to, particularly recently, a lack of titles for us to bash out, I have no idea. All I’m concerned with is rather than having to wait for something to pop onto my desk, if I’m bored, I can grab something new for practically pennies.
N+, the game with an award-winningly short name, brings you closer to ‘The Way of the Ninja’ by allowing you to control a stick-figured ninja around a possibly infinite amount of levels. You move around these simplistic looking stages, navigating a series of puzzling scenarios with sometimes life threatening situations in order to push a button and open a door allowing you to exit the level and progress onward.
In each level there’s gold to collect, which gives you more time to an ever ticking down time limit. The levels come in blocks of 5, and for each 5 levels you’ll start with 90 seconds that you can increase collecting the gold dotted around in often-precarious places. You may hate the idea of an ever-decreasing timeframe to work from, but it helps add tension to the set of levels, and at the end of the day the aim is to make your way through each level as quickly as possible – ninja style.
Through all fury incurred in playing this game for the first 100 levels or so, it’s stupidly addictive. Their ragdoll system means that every time you might stumble onto a mine or get electrocuted, your ninja-arse gets thrown all-over-the-shop; quite literally, as usually you’re in bits. And, while the physics might have you thinking “even for a ninja that’s not possible”, we know a thing or two about ninjas as you might’ve guessed, and we’ve collectively decided it is possible for an anorexic ninja to throw himself in unexpected directions. So there, take that law of gravity!
For the price you pay to download N+ you not only get all the levels that come with the game, but additional coop content and level editor to boot. Meaning, for the relatively cheap price of 800 points you get a game with infinite levels and replayability. Ace.
I must admit, I dragged Matt’s butt over to play some of the cooperative levels, and to his fairness he managed to hang on until we’d finished the first set of stages. But, as you can imagine, for all the frustrations you might encounter in the single-player mode, it’s twice as hard when your teammate keeps dieing on a particular section of the level and without him you can’t progress. However, in saying that he did keep coming back for more even if pulling the last of his hair out on the way.
I’d say the only one downside to the game is only one music track repetitively playing throughout the course of your gameplay. It would’ve been nice for a full soundtrack, but I’m sure this would’ve been down to budget and for what you pay I’m fairly certain you can’t complain, and if you were to do so I’d start watching the shadows a little closer than usual.
N+ got me hooked. It’s frustratingly addictive and packed with content. If you pop over to their site www.thewayoftheninja.org you can grab a PC copy to try out that’ll give you a taste of the game's magic.
N+, the game with an award-winningly short name, brings you closer to ‘The Way of the Ninja’ by allowing you to control a stick-figured ninja around a possibly infinite amount of levels. You move around these simplistic looking stages, navigating a series of puzzling scenarios with sometimes life threatening situations in order to push a button and open a door allowing you to exit the level and progress onward.
In each level there’s gold to collect, which gives you more time to an ever ticking down time limit. The levels come in blocks of 5, and for each 5 levels you’ll start with 90 seconds that you can increase collecting the gold dotted around in often-precarious places. You may hate the idea of an ever-decreasing timeframe to work from, but it helps add tension to the set of levels, and at the end of the day the aim is to make your way through each level as quickly as possible – ninja style.
Through all fury incurred in playing this game for the first 100 levels or so, it’s stupidly addictive. Their ragdoll system means that every time you might stumble onto a mine or get electrocuted, your ninja-arse gets thrown all-over-the-shop; quite literally, as usually you’re in bits. And, while the physics might have you thinking “even for a ninja that’s not possible”, we know a thing or two about ninjas as you might’ve guessed, and we’ve collectively decided it is possible for an anorexic ninja to throw himself in unexpected directions. So there, take that law of gravity!
For the price you pay to download N+ you not only get all the levels that come with the game, but additional coop content and level editor to boot. Meaning, for the relatively cheap price of 800 points you get a game with infinite levels and replayability. Ace.
I must admit, I dragged Matt’s butt over to play some of the cooperative levels, and to his fairness he managed to hang on until we’d finished the first set of stages. But, as you can imagine, for all the frustrations you might encounter in the single-player mode, it’s twice as hard when your teammate keeps dieing on a particular section of the level and without him you can’t progress. However, in saying that he did keep coming back for more even if pulling the last of his hair out on the way.
I’d say the only one downside to the game is only one music track repetitively playing throughout the course of your gameplay. It would’ve been nice for a full soundtrack, but I’m sure this would’ve been down to budget and for what you pay I’m fairly certain you can’t complain, and if you were to do so I’d start watching the shadows a little closer than usual.
N+ got me hooked. It’s frustratingly addictive and packed with content. If you pop over to their site www.thewayoftheninja.org you can grab a PC copy to try out that’ll give you a taste of the game's magic.
9/10
