Bionic Ninja

Copyright : Zeppelin Games | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

Well, we?ve had bionic woman, bionic man and now courtesy of Zeppelin games we have been given Bionic Ninja. As you may have guessed you?re a part man, part machine ninja who has gotten himself in more than a little bit of trouble, you job? to get yourself out of there and take out the bad guys before they take over the world.
Or something along those lines anyway

Graphics

Bionic Commando (a game released by Capcom, giants in the industry) had many problems with the graphical side of things, surely this couldn?t be repeated?
Well, sadly yes it can. Bionic Ninja does have quite a few glitches that help bring the gameplay down to an almost unplayable level. The game suffers from a slowdown bug when the screen becomes littered with enemies, our hero is often lost in the background due to some smart graphic designer making the outline of Bionic Ninja invisible so that the background can creep through and just about every bad guy in the game is repeated more than once per screen. Other drawbacks include the hardly ever changing backgrounds (it seems we?re stuck in the woods forever) and the appaling animation used both on our hero and those that attack him.

Sound

Sound is again another bad point about the game, we don?t get to hear any great intro music or in-game music and the sound effects might as well not exist. When you kill a bad guy he explodes and all you hear is a tiny thud from your speaker, not exactly worth turning the sound up and in fact we?ld suggest turning it down and listening to some music.

Gameplay

Because of the major graphical problems the game suffers from it?s not an easy game to play and certainly not the best looking CPC game in the range. The idea is simple, move from one end of the woods to the other while trying not to get killed and taking out the bad guys on the way, this sounds fairly straight forward but the controls are often unresponsive and it can be awkard at times. Levels are also pretty much the same, you complete one stage and it?s almost like you?ve started again, very boring.
Bionic Ninja doesn?t cut it on so many levels and considering the game was released in 1989 we?ld expect the developers to squeaze a little more life out of the CPC rather than make it look like a 48K ZX Spectrum, probably worth avoiding.