Game Reviews

Ninja Escape

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iOS
| Ninja Escape
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Ninja Escape
|
iOS
| Ninja Escape

Left, right, left, left, left, right, right, right, left.

No, it's not the instructions to a particularly basic dance. Nor is it a jaunty military march.

It's a game of Ninja Escape, described pretty much in its entirety.

Getting warmer

Oh, okay. Not in its entirety. There's the whole reason behind pressing left and right to discuss yet.

So here we go. You press left and right to make your ninja (or whatever character you unlock and select through persistent play) hop between platforms in a bid to stay ahead of a raging, ascending fire.

Hop too slow, and the fire will catch up with you, but just as dangerous is missing your cue - pressing left when you should have pressed right, and vice versa.

There are also broken platforms that will send you to a similarly fiery end.

Peaks early

On such simple ingredients Pine Entertainment builds a game - or at least tries to.

There's much to be said for simplicity in mobile games, of course. What's more, endless runners have often excelled on half the number of button inputs than can be found in Ninja Escape.

But the best simple games offer a tactile response to those limited button presses. They make their simple traversal systems feel alive and analogue and far richer than they have any right to be.

Ninja Escape does not. You hop left and right in response to binary platform prompts. It feels rote and rehearsed, like you're repeating a memorised input pattern to gain entry to some system or other.

There's a certain amount of satisfaction in beating your high score and unlocking cute new characters, but to suggest that the process of actually playing Ninja Escape is much fun? Well, that's a bit of a leap.

Ninja Escape

A rote, mechanical endless climber that lacks the tactile sophistication such a simple premise requires
Score
Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.