Review: Mini-Ninjas Demo

Here’s another mini-review, this time of the new adventure-platform game:

You guys probably know how hard it is to find good adventure-platform games on computers – and almost nothing at all when it comes to new titles.

Fortunately Mini Ninjas from Eidos will change everything.

If you haven’t played the Mini Ninjas demo I really recommend it. It’s been a while since I have played this type of game for the PC.

You can download the demo version using your Steam account – click here to do this (you need Steam running to use this link)! Or you can download the standalone demo from Gamers Hell.

The demo needs around 800MB to run in both cases and a pretty decent computer with shader model 3 support (you can check out the system requirements here).

Why Mini Ninjas is cool? I will try to put it in 6 simple points.

Humor and appearance

The game is just fun and very nicely designed. It can certainly be compared to Ubisoft’s – Rayman series. Graphic style itself is a bit like free EA Games title – Battlefield Heroes. Main characters are really fun to observe and control. Each of them has different abilities and fighting style but I’ll get to that later.

Controls

Controlling the game is pleasant, you can figure out very quickly what you are doing  (using the mouse to aim and fight and keyboard to move around and use your abilities and inventory). Of course, there is support for gamepads – which is probably the best way to play this kind of games.

Music and effects

Music is not irritating and it’s catchy – don’t be surprised if you catch yourself singing those melodies on your way to work or school. The sound effects are very pleasing to the ear. Although enemies do sound like a bunch of old people on speed. 

Playability

It is simply curious, you can control 3 characters at once (at least in the demo). We can  find small elements of RPG games – the inventory with various objects that we find later in the game. From what I’ve seen there will be few objects in the game that we’re going to combine to get a stronger item out of them. Also, there are shops in the game (you can get new weapons, healing potions and something like stamina potions which can get you run faster for a longer period of time).

This game is family friendly which means you can enjoy this game on your PC or console with your kids.

Optimization

Mini Ninjas engine is sweet. It plays smoothly on a decent PC. I assume this is not a complete console port but a totally different version of the game designed for the PC – I could be wrong though.

The idea

Because we needed a Ninja game! ;)

Mini Ninjas is scheduled to be released on 11 September 2009. We don’t know if it’s going to be released on all leading digital platforms at this time.

I hope this title is going to be priced fairly on Steam and other platforms…

Here’s a little gameplay video I made the other day: