Shadow of the Ninja: Reborn – PS5 Review

Shadow of the Ninja: Reborn is a scrolling beat ’em up from Tengo Project, best known for recently revamping old games like Wild Guns, The Ninja Warriors and Pocky & Rocky.  We also fondly remember their work on the Xbox 360 shoot ’em up Omega Five, which is one of the greatest games ever made (and badly needs a new audience).  This one is also a revamp of a 1990 NES title.

We say revamp but that barely does it justice.  The original NES game was pretty well-regarded and impressive in its day but this version is a total rebuild that gives the game a deluxe coin-op aesthetic making it look like the sort of arcade game you’d have dreamed of playing back when arcades were still about proper games.

The basic premise is the same as ever though.  You get to pick from one of two ninjas and then have to head towards the right, taking out enemies, navigating jumps and ultimately taking on bosses as you battle shadowy forces in a dystopian future.  The plot is told via some introductory cutscenes but beyond that, there’s no real story to worry about.

In terms of the gameplay, if you’ve ever played any beat ’em up from Double Dragon to Shinobi, you’ll immediately have an idea of what’s going on but there’s a little bit of complexity to this remake.  Where most old coin-ops in this genre would usually give you a couple of buttons (jump and attack), there are a few more to worry about here.  There’s an additional long range attack, a handy blade on a rope type of deal which you can fire in any direction (we recommend using the d-pad if you want to reliably hit those diagonals though) as well as a dash move on L1 and a function for swapping inventory items on R1.

Aside from that you’ve also got the motion of your ninja to think about.  Rather than just jump up through platforms a’la Shinobi or Rolling Thunder, your ninja will grab the underside of it, requiring you to press up to the move onto it.  It’s a little clunky and you may find yourself trying to do that last step with the jump button for a while until you get your muscle memory under control.  But once you get used to things, the game gets good.

The combat isn’t exactly fast and furious, instead you’re trying to figure out how to take out individual threats carefully without being injured but it’s all good fun.  Rather than the usual army of palette-swapped goons, there are lots of varied foes to deal with who all offer unique challenges, so this is a bit more cerebral than the usual coin-munching enemy churn that ’80s arcade goers might be used to.

There are also plenty of elite and boss encounters who all add a bit of visual interest and will all stop you in your tracks until you figure out how best to beat them.  We were entirely stuck several times until we eventually figured out how to take each one out.  That said, the difficulty here is pretty savage.  Maybe not so much in terms of individual moments but rather in how you have to tie together a series of small wins to get to the next checkpoint, not that the game has many of those.  It generally only takes you back to the start of the level or the start of a boss battle.  So be prepared for some miserable stretches where you have to consistently get through quite long stages of the game knowing that you might have to restart from further back than you’d like.

For us though, the main issue was with the inventory system.  You get lots of items, mainly weapons but also healing boosts, but accessing them is the most awful chore.  Pressing R1 switches between your current item and the next one in your inventory but if you want to access anything else, such as a health kit during a difficult boss battle, you have to hold R1 and fanny about with left and right (which feel oddly reversed during the process) all in real-time without the game pausing.  It’s just about the absolute worst way to do it and was the difference between dismal failure and success far too often for our liking.

But aside from that this is an absolutely kick-ass retro remake.   The action is a lot more dynamic than the original, the visuals are absolutely splendid, the music is familiar but beefed up brilliantly and it all just speaks to what we’ve been saying forever which is that if you’re going to use retro aesthetics, don’t make something that looks like it was made in the ’80s or ’90s, make something that would have blown our minds back then.  Shadow of the Ninja absolutely does that.  It’s got the visual splendour of something like Strider but bigger and better.

There’s also local multiplayer, which is a must have given that the original is such a co-op classic, but aside from that the game is a little lacking in options with just an Arcade Mode (with only two difficulty settings – Normal and Hard – that are both potentially too difficult for some) and a Time Attack Mode (does anyone ever bother with those?).  There’s some sort of shop thing going on that lets you buy items at the start of a game but that doesn’t really offset the big challenge that’s ahead of you.

Mostly though, this is retro remaking done right.  Sure, you maybe could and should have included the original NES game just to let gamers compare and contrast them but NES games have mostly all aged out too much now (sorry, we’re English so the NES doesn’t have a huge place in our hearts here) and so the main event here is this reimagining of the original and it absolutely delivers.