Another ninja game! There may have been some concern that the British public were at saturation point for them, given that this was renamed from the name for its first release in the US, from Ninja Gaiden, to be slightly less obviously ninja-y. This one is also a real late-in-the-day work-out for the Spectrum’s powers, involving extra-big sprites fighting it out against much more dynamic settings than, say, Way of the Tiger. The results, it goes without saying, aren’t pretty, especially coming into it after a long run of much cleaner-looking games (fellow Spectrum title Fantasy World Dizzy included) but they do offer some new experiences, which is not bad after this many years.
It’s a roving beat-’em-up with fighting that’s much less technical than the Renegade games or Barbarian, but it combines it with just enough movement and platforming that it’s not just the giant figures providing interest. I did work out that standing on the spot and holding down the attack button made me invulnerable to oncoming attackers, meaning that hanging out in a corner and waiting for them all to come to me was a winning strategy. Reading reviews later I found that it wasn’t just me who hit on this, either. It makes for a very different experience than similar games to date, but not in a way that’s only bad.
For one thing, games where you don’t have to do much but play out a straightforward strategy can still be fun – lots of stuff is still happening, and there’s an humour to watching it all play out, an endless stream of guys who learn nothing from their mates and just can’t wait to throw themselves into the hero’s feet. For another thing, the just-keep-kicking approach is not a completely comprehensive approach. It doesn’t work if there are enemies on both sides of you, so avoiding that becomes the challenge. And the boss fights still have to be taken in a different way.
So Shadow Warriors does some useful testing of limits. Can there still be an interesting spin on a genre that people have been making games in on the same computers for at least five years at this point? Can that still be fun to play in a way which isn’t just “I recognise this established fun thing”? Even without making it interesting through story, or through any particularly inventive addition? Given that we’re going to see a lot of attempts to do the same in future as winning formulas get ruthlessly followed, I’m glad at how surprisingly easy it is to say that the answer is yes.
