Tiny Pixels Vol 1 – Ninpo Blast

Tiny Pixels Vol 1 – Ninpo Blast is a ninja-themed vertically-scrolling shoot ’em up from the ever-prolific budget publisher eastasiasoft.  As with the vast majority of their shoot ’em ups, this utilises a 16-bit style of presentation to offer up a retro-styled experience.

That’s well within eastasiasoft’s wheelhouse.  We’ve reviewed dozens of shoot ’em ups from them, and usually they’re reasonably competent at least, albeit sometimes with a bit of a lack of scope or issues with game balance or originality.

Having a ninja theme to things does make the game a little more original than the usual space shooter (although we’ve seen it done before, and better, in the past) and here that theme translates to your main character having two weapon types.

You’ve got a ‘kunai’ which is pretty much just a forward firing weapon while your ‘shuriken’ weapon is your standard spread fire kind of thing.  You can hold down either button to auto-fire but you can’t use both together.  There’s also a bomb too but that’s pretty weak and wasn’t much use to us in testing.

Beyond that, all the game asks you to do is progress through level after level, each one punctuated by a boss battle and all of them are randomly generated.  There doesn’t appear to be any ending to the game, instead it just randomly throws up levels at you.  This, like any game that does it, means that there’s a lack of character, structure and flow to the game design.

The gameplay itself is reasonably straightforward but there is an upgrade progression to things.  When you kill enemies, they drop tokens and these can be spent at the end of a game on permanent weapon upgrades (as well as new character designs and backdrops).  Tokens don’t exactly come quickly though, especially at the start when you’re not really powerful enough to take out many enemies before dying,  but as you build up your weapons, things get slowly better and you’ll improve faster.  The big issue we had though was that, even when upgraded, the shuriken weapon (the spread fire one) is terrible and barely effective.  It’ll just get you killed.  So you’ll want to put all your eggs in the ‘kunai’ basket if you want to get anywhere.

Eventually you’ll brute force your way through enough levels to nab the game’s Platinum trophy though and then all that’s left is to take a quick look at the game’s online leaderboards.  At the moment these are very sparsely occupied (like is this game ever going to make any money?!) and to compete you’ll need to be fully upgraded anyway.

Overall, things just are a bit underwhelming here.  You never feel powerful but then neither do the enemies, they’re just durable meaning you have to stay in their way hoping your bullets kill them before they crash into you.  The upgrade system feels glacially slow and is full of absolute nonsense such as the option to buy new colours for the levels.  Yep, instead of green walls you can try blue ones or whatever.  Even though the actual backdrop is just plain black which means you’ll feel like this is a space shooter anyway, despite the whole ninja thing.  It’s just so very basic.  Why not at least have a different colour for each stage?

The only thing the game has going for it is a degree of a challenge that you need to overcome.  Sure, it only takes brute-forcing the upgrade system to do it, rather than any real actual skill, but at least for an hour or two, the game does offer up a little bit of resistance and the upgrading is a little bit addictive for a while.

But beyond that, this is a low-budget effort that just doesn’t really give you any reason to check it out.  It’s just ordinary in every aspect but at least it works on a basic level and offers up a bit of upgrading to keep you semi-interested for a little while.  It’s definitely not much of an advert for Tiny Pixels Vol 2 though.