Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Total letdown"

The original Mini Ninjas was a delightful little family friendly 3D platformer, that had lots of nice ideas and fun moments. But we need to be blunt here. The Kinect only follow up is a shamefully broken mess and a wasted opportunity. That's not to say that Mini Ninjas Adventures is entirely bad, there's some nice little touches here and there, but these are largely inherited from the original game.

The games story is simple but nicely written, with the sweet looking style of the original. Although, while true to the first game, it's definitely not as nice looking as its forbear and could be best described as cheap.

All the original voice cast are still here, although that might just be because some of them were reused audio assets. That's more or less all there is going for it though. At best Mini Ninjas Adventures (we're surprised there's no "Kinect" in the title) is sub-par. At its worst it's a travesty.

The move to Kinect it almost entirely to blame for the game being a wasted opportunity. For example, turning the release into one of a range of smaller platforming titles could have done really well on Xbox Live Arcade and would have been wholly appropriate. Instead we have a shallow shooting gallery that's both boring and poorly constructed.

It's a recurring feature of Kinect that a large number of titles using the device feel rushed or broken, but Mini Ninjas Adventures is the worst by far. Motion detection is poor in all lighting conditions and often, no matter what action we were required to do, it took at least three or four attempts to pull off.

Positioning yourself in the play area was also unresponsive. Each stage requires you to move from side to side to evade enemy samurai attacks and to strike out at enemies with a range of attacks. Every stage is a play area of about six spaces wide. This is a perfectly understandable design choice given the restriction of Kinect, but often you'll fail to be picked up, taking hits from enemy arrows because you're unable to move out of the way, or being caught in an explosion because you can't get into place in time to kick the bomb away. A kick that you'll, more often than not, be unable to register with the game anyway, even after three attempts.

This is a title aimed at children but even we had to work hard to keep our patience with the game. Not that progressing through the three short worlds is much of a challenge – difficulty here is utterly non-existent. Couple that with the fact the several of the games "levels" are actually short tutorial stages and you'll find the game over and don in an afternoon.

It's sold as "21 levels of intense ninja action" but of those twenty-one levels a good chunk are tutorials, short changing those who were expecting anything more. With time the game introduces a number of different mechanics to the mix; amongst these are the bow and arrow which requires you to swap from a sword in your right hand, to the bow in your left. While swapping weapons was always a really smooth process, actually using the bow is near impossible.

Random swinging and flailing of your right arm is far more effective than actually attempting to fire your bow. Even then arrows are shot off entirely by chance; sometimes two at once, sometimes none at all for several attempts.


You're also introduced to some Kinect voice controls. Freeing your Mini Ninja friends, you're given the chance to call upon them for help every time you charge your ninja powers. You do so by literally shouting "NINJA!" at your TV which is all good fun we're sure you'll agree, but the problem is that every little sound picked up by the Kinect will launch your over excited friends into attacking.

Shameful, shoddy, short, disappointing, broken and just no fun; all words we would never use to describe the original Mini Ninjas, but sadly words that best describe Mini Ninjas Adventures. If we have one bit of advice for this title, it's avoid.