Shinobi Spirits S Legend of Heroes/忍スピリッツS 真田獣勇士伝

If you want a 2-5 hour no frills action platformer with Sanrio-esque characters rampaging through Sengoku era mischief, then this is undeniably for you ;) You want more details? … eh, sure Shinobi Spirits S is a short but charming action platformer that sits firmly between Goemon’s Great Adventure on the N64 and Castle Crashers. More or less what you see on the tin (the trailer) will be exactly what you’ll get. Platforming, cutting up grunt baddies, beating bosses, and retrying stages on various difficulties. The music really puts you in the mood to go in swinging and the gameplay delivers. One thing I personally enjoyed was the fact that you can reset your skill points at any time to try out new builds. Spent nearly an hour just experimenting between character summoning, shuriken, and sword gameplay. Its genuinely fun to optimize your skills to try and complete some of the “Hard mode” difficulty challenges There are a few quality of life features I would have liked, but it's mostly a nitpick. (At least at the time I'm writing this) Like something that can help you find Scrolls / Notes after the game is over. Or a setting that would allow the player to restart the stage immed…

Flawed (odd controls [wants analog for platformer movement instead of dpad, dpad bound to weird functions, reversed confirm/cancel jump/attack from what you might expect], not enough music variety, not much environment variety, hunting for collectibles is more annoying than it needs to be, bottomless pits are too punishing and not well telegraphed) but cute and reasonably fun platformer with some grinding skill tree stuff going on if you feel like replaying.

Not recommended, but has a lot of charm and might be ideal for young players. This could have been so much more... For starters, the graphics, animations and effects are well done. The game is polished and the collecting of spirits to unlock the skill tree is a big plus. The story is nothing special but it was neat to unlock the other characters (although you can't directly use them, only as a summons). Unfortunately, combat is too basic and desperately needs a better combo system. Enemies are too simple and uninspired, same for most of the bosses, which you can beat most of them by just throwing shurikens over and over. The level design is boring and intended to be grindy, but I liked that there were collectables scattered about. Oddly enough, you can even get through most of the game without even fighting and it only took me 2 hours to get to the ending. For the asking price, this game is a letdown. It could be a decent game if only it had more depth.

Very good small action game, with a skill tree and various difficulty levels.

Action platformer with cute animal characters. Gameplay is fast and fun, especially if you have a xbox controller. The setting is Warring States of Japan and the music really puts into Ninja hype. Overall I really enjoyed this product.