Master Cyber-Ninja Action

I’ve always laughed at the idea of the “good ninja”. You know, the honorable ninjas that protect the innocent and fight bad guys. The thing is, just like most of our legislators, Ninjas were not honorable. They’re assassins whose job is to sneak in, kill the heck out of their target, and sneak out. Many times if they were caught or if they failed their mission they’d kill themselves. I mean suicide was as honorable as it got for them so that should tell you something.

I think the 70’s and 80’s were where this whole idea of good guy ninjas came about and then got popularized by things like the Ninja Turtles, the awesome American Ninja movies with the awesome Michael Dudekoff, and NES games like Ninja Gaiden, Wrath of the Black Manta, and just about everything on the Neo Geo.

The topic of today’s review is Cyber Shadow, which I played on the Xbox Series X. Developed by Mechanical Head Studios and published by Shovel Knight developer Yacht Club Games, it carries on that classic 80’s tradition of glorifying the good guy ninja clan, with retro styled graphics that will immediately remind you of Ninja Gaiden and also if you want to get more recent, the 2018 action game The Messenger.

You play as Shadow, the last surviving member of his ninja clan. Your job is to stop Dr Progen and his army of robots, who have taken over the world and something something your clan master was a chick and now she looks like a Ghost from Destiny because something about Essence and there’s Ethos and dragons and elementals and transferring consciousness, and honestly I stopped paying attention because it made no sense to me after awhile. I read online that the writers only used a 4th of their lore they created, which after reading through all this stuff felt like they were doing me a favor because that meant my eyes glazed over a 4th as much as they were originally meant to. It still makes more sense than the story in Kingdom Hearts, but then that’s not saying much.

The graphics are good and everything animates well. There are lots of different environments you’ll travel through, from laboratories to factories…I’m assuming this level here is Detroit (show footage of level). The convoluted as fuck story is told through cutscenes, computer logs you’ll come across, and also the carcasses of – well I’m assuming they’re dead ninjas but they’re not dressed like them – scattered throughout the game. The real problem I had with following it is that you’ll find them all a little infrequently, so instead of learning large chunks of the story at one time, you get them sprinkled throughout. If you’re like me and have children, a job, a drinking problem from the children and job, and therefore a memory like a goldfish, you’ll forget what all was already said by the time you get to the next bunch of computers.

Along with the graphics, the music is really good, too. Lots of energetic NES-styled music that’ll motivate you to send everything to the scrap heap. (include footage of cartoon wolverine and the sentinel) Like for a retro styled game it’s one of the better soundtracks I’ve heard in awhile.

I was expecting something overly hard with a lot of cheap deaths, but the difficulty is challenging but fair and ramps up a lot toward the last 2/3rds of the game.

So what’s the gameplay like? It’s pretty fun. I was expecting something overly hard with a lot of cheap deaths, but the difficulty is challenging but fair and ramps up a lot toward the last 2/3rds of the game. Like some developers try to go for the super high difficulty because they don’t actually know anything about NES or old 8-bit era games despite acting like it. Kinda like most game journalists. You start the game without any abilities and make your way through each area, slashing away at tons of robots. You’ll see different robot bugs, robot jumping things, robots that float around like the medusa heads in Castlevania, and robot guys with what I’m assuming are robot guns that shoot robot bullets. If you like robots then you’ll love this.

Anwyays, you pick up new abilities and powers throughout the game like a dash and double jump. This makes getting around easier, but one huge difference I noticed that got me killed a lot, is that Cyber Shadow uses your old habits against you. What I mean is that normally in a lot of 8 and 16-bit games, when you take damage, you’ll blink for a second or two and you’ll be invincible. This makes any knockback you suffer more bearable so that you can get your bearings and keep yourself alive easier. You’ll use that time blinking to kill an enemy, jump from spikes onto safe land, or just run right through an enemy like a lunatic.

This game still has knockback and limited temporary invincibility after you get hit, but unlike a lot of 8-bit games you are not, I repeat NOT safe from instant kills like spikes during that time. So if you get hit by an enemy that knocks you back onto spikes, you’ll die. That honestly got me killed more than anything else in this and by the end of the game is was pretty maddening. Other ways I’d die would be by whiffing a dash attack and heading right into spikes or dashing when I didn’t mean to.

See, to dash you do a touble tap of the analog or d-pad, then hit attack to shoot you forward a long distance. You can parry attacks by tapping once in the direction of the enemy bullet about to hit you. The bullet will become a projectile you hit with your sword to send it flying back at the enemy. So you can imagine that accidentally hitting that direction twice and then attacking will send you flying to your death. Sometimes double tapping won’t even register as a dash and that will get you killed.

There are checkpoints throughout the game that you’ll start back at when you die. Those can be upgraded with the currency you pick up so that you can get all your SP for your abilities back and you’ll also get a special weapon perk. Boss fights are pretty fun and not usually challenging. You won’t really hit any difficulty spikes with them and they’re a welcome break from the platforming.

You’ll also come across teleporters next to some of the checkpoints that you can use to go to different levels. When you’re on the map, you’ll see a percentage of what you’ve collected and the game’s overall progress. That’s great in theory, but one flaw I found is that they’re infrequent enough that by teleporting there and finding whatever nifty gifties you were looking for (footage of michael scott?), your choice is to either run through the entire level to get to the next teleporter, or backtrack to the original one. Either way can be a slog and you can’t just jump in and jump out. And some of these levels are a little irritating to go through as it is. You know what sucks? Feeling punished for exploring an area by dying repeatedly trying to make it out.

So Cyber Shadow is a fun time that you shouldn’t be afraid to give a shot to if you’re on the fence, though it has some annoying quirks. The story would be more interesting if it didn’t read like how Jeffy travels in the old Family Circus comics, but that doesn’t really take away from the gameplay at all. What does take away from the gameplay are how the game lets you travel between levels, the dash ability, and my personal irritation with the invncibility frames I mentioned earlier. One last thing I’ll note is that the game is on the short side at 6-8 hours, and you can tack on a little more time to get all the collectibles. Even at a shorter length though, I felt like the game was well paced and didn’t feel like it was too short. Also you may be able to beat it quicker as I tend to play games pretty slowly. All that said Cyber Shadow is available on Game Pass and it’s a fun throwback to 8-bit action games, and it’s also got a little of it’s own spin on how it does things and I think that gives it personality.