SHINOBI: Art of Vengeance Review

It’s a crowded realm in the kingdom of side-scrolling platforming games, particularly of late. Players can hardly throw a rock without hitting some magnificent example of high-flying parkour goodness – so you need to make sure you are offering something pretty sharp to stand out. Even donning the dark cloth of a ninja mask may not be enough to separate you in the year of our lord 2025, but I tell you what WILL get your razor sharp point across: excellent gameplay and no reliance on roguelite mechanics to motivate replayability.

Oh, and perhaps a healthy dose of near-silent protagonist grunts during dialogue.

The product placement is a tad late to the party

Shinobi: Art of Vengeance is a glorious resurrection of the Shinobi franchise of years past, plucked from the backlog of SEGA staples and enjoying a vigorous dusting off. This entry is helmed by the talented folks at Lizardcube (who dropped the spectacular Streets of Rage 4 a little while back), pouring their refreshing signature 2D gorgeousness into a tale of swords, sorcery and stolen reaper scythes.

Being a Shinobi game, you better believe the combat is fluid as all get out. Joe Musashi leaps, dodges and slashes with the best of them, and even my meagre paws can wring a stunning display out of him. It helps that enemies all have varying states of aggressiveness, with well telegraphed intent behind the stuff that really matters – so weaving in and out of danger is intuitive and easy to achieve. While the impact of the combat peaked nice and early, it wasn’t a case of disappointment – the game introduces a few unique mechanics to shake things up here and there, but it never crosses a line where your developed rhythm feels punished. Heavily armoured dudes require a heftier strike, kunai are plentiful, and if you are ever in doubt you can always reach deep into your bag of ninja magic and unleash a huge ninjutsu technique to create some space. Hell, there are even massive screen-wiping techniques if you want to explore the nuclear option.

The deep hook of the combat is simply the amount of control that the player gets to enjoy as the leader of the Oboro Clan, with Joe ducking, diving and decimating foes at his leisure. There is very little in the way of animation locking, so your split-second decisions to disengage from one foe and take out another comes all too easily – the only real investment comes from being in the air, and that only really comes into play if you have already expended both your double jump AND your air dash. You end up feeling like a fighting game character, with a stellar move set and a distinct range of solutions for the many murderous mooks that are coming your way – with failures coming from a bad judgement call on your part.

Bad guy lairs are begging for a workplace safety lawsuit

Your immediate set of ninja combat skills are generously devastating, even from the outset. With a wide arcing regular attack, and a slower heavy attack offering opportunities to juggle enemies, it becomes immediately apparent that flipping some poor sucker into the air and keeping them there for an age is not just viable, it’s fun as hell. With these skills mastered, the friendly shopkeeper (a hog-like Yōkai) offers fun new toys and tricks by way of amulets and new moves to expand your repertoire, with many of them taking existing moves and adding a new bit of flair to them – such as turning my obsession with the dive kick into a cartwheeling combo attack if I held down the button after striking an enemy. It is the kind of upgrade system that appeals to me greatly, because you can clearly play to your strengths and be rewarded immediately.

You can cover your arse too, with the range of equipable goodies in the game serving as a further option to fine-tune your very own ninja style. Initially I leaned heavily on a jutsu that offered a wide parry and counter attack, before swapping to something more aggressive – similarly, I equipped a talisman that increased all my sources of healing as a way to cover up my endless issues with correctly dodging bullets. Eventually my thumbs acquired their own black belt, and I was able to shed these crutches and trade for something more rewarding, such as having my kunai pierce their targets. Key moments of the game will offer these goodies as an incentive to shake up your build, so you are always welcome to experiment – even going so far as to offer a training area for would-be master ninjas to hone their craft.

Joe says more with a grunt than I ever could with words

While the game is impressively pretty, special attention needs to be directed to the technical implementation of it all. The liberal use of parallax within levels does a lot to make this 2D game feel incredibly immersive and deep, with more than a few examples eliciting a proper IRL “oooh” response on my end. You’d be easily fooled into thinking there was a decent amount of 3D assets in play, but fiddling about and navigating the world you start to see it’s all just a clever trick of the eye. This is supported beautifully by an intelligent in-game camera that carefully positions itself to alter the mood on screen, pulling in and out depending on the landscape – such as widening when you are platforming across a perilous expanse or tightening itself to make a ventilation shaft feel all the more claustrophobic. The game runs like a dream, a clear outcome of the efficient (but effective) visual style being employed.

These environments are a ton of fun to inhabit also, with ol’ mate Joe moving precisely how you’d expect a master Shinobi to do so. Double jumping and dashing to cross ridiculous gaps becomes old hat lightning fast, a rote expectation of the air-defying ninja arts – before further tools are offered that let you cling to walls or even recharge an air dash while airborne. A great amount of restraint was on display with some of the scarier jumping sections, with Lizardcube mercifully only adding a small amount of specific enemies to make sure the challenge wasn’t fighting equal parts gravity and some airborne dickhead. The platforming offers a ton of opportunities to really feel like a ninja – like outrunning a bladed wall just to vanish into a ceiling hole. No special skills needed, just keen eyes and a well timed leap or dash will have you escaping all manner of deadly hazards that leave you questioning the workplace safety rating of the demonic army facilities.

It is worth keeping an eye out as you sneak and slash around, as each level houses a multitude of secrets that can be beneficial to your progress – with more becoming accessible as you unlock additional ninja tools. These manifest as currency or collectibles mostly, but the combat challenges strewn across your journey offer a chaotic diversion that is well worth checking out, especially when they present unique enemy types in advance of their debut. They feel like miniature ninja exams, so test your mettle and see how good you really are.

Forbidden ninja technique: powerful penis punch

The narrative is a fun tale of demonic armies and ninja revenge, with absurdly over the top characters and magnificent legions of goons, all told through talking heads and small-scale slideshow cutscenes with delicious fullscreen artworks. The villain does a great Clancy Brown impression, all smarm and quiet menace, with his lieutenants all seeming like they leapt out of an episode of Power Rangers Super Samurai. There is something deeply fun about hearing the words “Demon Ape, make short work of him!” and knowing you are in for a primate punch-up boss battle.

One thing I don’t quite grasp is the decision to pause gameplay whenever a character needs to drop a quick line of dialogue – “The shinobi is here!? We can’t let him access this facility!” is a great line for the sake of making you feel like a terrifying force that these goons are scared of – but it feels decidedly less impressive when Joe Musashi is just sitting patiently, tapping his foot, waiting for the line to end. There are quite a few of these moments within the game, and they could easily have been triggered as background dialogue that plays while you run along a corridor or ascend a wall – it’s not an egregious thing, but it’s jarringly noticeable at the worst of times. 

Graciously, the cast of mythical weirdos that make up both friend and foe in the game are all well worth listening to – alongside a banging soundtrack that is the perfect backing to sniffing out secrets in a level. Being a SEGA property, I heard more than a few recycled soundbytes from other games, but their execution feels more like a fun homage than a dodgy corner-cutting measure. The game bleeds its SEGA-bound roots, quietly celebrating it wherever it can – either by an environmental detail that is clearly in reference to another title of times past, or a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it background cameo that I couldn’t help but grin at. The resurrection of Joe Musashi means his mates get a little sun as well.

‘Sword through the guts’ is a bold look

The niggles of the game are small enough to be forgivable – but they are notable all the same. While the voice acting is great fun, there are several examples of a particular word being pronounced differently depending on the character – and it is not a case of elocution or accent. It doesn’t take a level of Japanese mastery to understand how some words are pronounced, and when they were flawlessly mentioned only moments prior the experience is like finding something crunchy in your custard.

There are also a few sections where the game leans on the barrier of “too challenging”, mostly when projectile based attacks hit an upper limit. Art of Vengeance does not posture itself as a bullet-hell-lite, so the moments where Joe is deftly ducking and weaving for what feels like an age stand out in comparison. However, this is quite well balanced by how the game approaches difficulty – making use of the phenomenal new-age standard of “dial-a-difficulty” where a screen full of sliders awaits for tweaking. If you have atrophied game-journalist hands like myself, a few short tweaks can alleviate a little of the pressure in these areas – without dropping everything into a “Tourist Mode” sleep walking simulator. You can then ramp things back up to where they were, and still feel like you are achieving your ninja dreams. It’s good stuff.

Final Thoughts

Lizardcube have done something exceptional here, celebrating and reviving a series that was dormant for no good reason. The level of polish given to the dazzling visuals are easily enough to draw one’s attention, but once you get your hands on the games combat and platforming prowess, you’ll be deeply hooked into the vengeful tale of Joe Musashi and his quest to defeat Lord Ruse. The takeaway is simple: Ninjas are awesome.

Reviewed on PS5 // Review code supplied by publisher

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