Review: Mini Ninjas

Remembering the stars, the main bad guy thoroughly prepared. He sent first stormy people to floods, floods and earthquakes, and then began to catch animals in the forests, from which, with the help of magic, Kuji (such is natural sorcery) created thousands of soldiers with katanas, bows, spears and wild reserves of loyalty to the commander, they and they carried news about the change of power to the people. Features of magic Coogee is that uncontrolled use of nature does not like it. Mother-ancestor answers short-sighted magicians with cataclysms, catastrophes and rain on public holidays. These disturbances were noticed by the wisest and most perceptive master ninja. "Something wrong has happened," he told the students, handing out diplomas and certificates about the end of the ninja school. "Go and find out what's happening there, what kind of figures are in the woods where the animals and all that are disappearing, and then you'll soon have nothing to eat ..." - he said, letting the young warriors shade into a big, cruel and dangerous world.

So five left. The teacher scratched his turnips, decided that it would be nice to send another sixth, podnataskal maltsa in magic, showed how to cook any swill from magical grass, taught to beat mordases, and then kicked out of the village from the ninja settlement. "Go and save the world, Hiro," the old man said. Hiro, probably, at that moment thought that his name was not in vain with the word "hero" - "hero" in English. He straightened the katana, put on a special ninja hat, and went very banally to save the world. What kind of adventure will this be?

There are a lot of games on the consoles that grew out of the once popular platformers. Remember, maybe such old hits - Lomax , Blackthorneand the like. Two dimensions, platforms, enemies, which must be somehow killed (or neutralized, such lomaxes are very kind). With the development of technology, this kind of arcade has smoothly passed into the third dimension, the worlds have expanded, and the platforms as such have disappeared. For some reason, this evolution did not affect the PC, and new games started to be released only on consoles, for example: Crash Bandicoot , Spyro The Dragon , Bugs Bunny , Legend of Zelda , One (and thousands more of different seriousness, bloodiness and all that). They are released even now, but our musicians somehow bypass (for a long time already, very, very). Therefore, it is surprising that, along with the release on consoles faithful to the legacy of the ancestors of the arcade Mini Ninjasleft and on the PC. For the first time (practically) for many years we will kill enemies, collect coins, get bonuses to hard-to-reach places and admire a rustic, but bright and colorful picture.

Hiro leaves the village. We "hang" behind him, to the right and left of us are vast meadows. Ahead, literally in a couple of steps, we notice a flower in the grass. It can be picked up - this is one of the main features of the genre, we will be engaged in collecting and collecting the whole game. Since time immemorial, developers have been motivated to explore and discover. The flower compactly lay down in a backpack. We look around, on the other side of the meadow we see a mountain. Somewhere above, very high on a cliff, casts something red in the red. From the experience of the past, we know that if something stands out, it's something that needs to be picked up. How can I climb a mountain? We approach the wall, press the space, the small ninja runs up the steep slope, clings to the ledge, pulls up, jumps, pushes away from the natural wall, bounces back to the next, and then again ... Did Prince himself learn clever flights here? It's not for nothing that mini-ninja pirouettes are so similar to Persian style jumps ...

After a couple of minutes we climb to the very top, pick up some kind of figure (the game says "found 1 of 7," a tradition), we notice an enemy patrol below. And we immediately understand that this is the enemy. Our ninja, though it shows only the eyes, but it is immediately obvious from them - he is a good-natured young and naive. The enemies do not have faces, only the darkness under the samurai helmets, in which a bright yellow flame burns the eyes. We are already on the ground. As it should be in the case of a real ninja, they do not know about us yet. We can hide in the tall grass (a special button is responsible for the invisibility mode), but we can brazenly and unceremoniously attack a patrol with only one bare katana, that is, practically hand-to-hand. An unexpected attack will cause more damage, but my Hiro is a real hero, so I like the idea of chopping off an opponent boldly. The patrol looks hostile, and after seeing us, soldiers show ill-intentioning with a war cry "Mini mini mini ninja!", and then rush, exposing all the piercing, cutting-shooting objects. And all of them, like our hero, are small in number, why their military attempts look more cute than dangerous.

The sword cuts the air with whistling, bright lights all over the place, the enemies scatter everywhere, but the skillful Hiro quickly catches up with them and knocks out all the special effects. Red balls, fireworks and melodic sounds accompany a session of pressure in the soup. Press the button "Q", time fades, on the screen there is a sight, which can mark several enemies. After a moment, all the above-mentioned enemies fall to the ground - Hiro jumps lightly from one to another, pours them so fast that the warriors of the evil samurai can not even figure out what has happened. In the scale on the right, one bulb fizzles out - it was a charged attack, limited by special reception. The defeated opponents burst, and from the blue haze there are little animals-those whom the evil samurai kidnapped. In Mini Ninjas, no one dies, we just save animals. Remember, in the seriesSonic, we have done this more than once - how many little animals the Doctor hired? Here everything is very logical, small soldiers are foxes and bunnies (and every other living creature: raccoons, chickens, cats). Their commanders - this game is bigger - monkeys and wild boars. The largest soldiers are usually obtained from bears or pandas (super-bearish bears).

Here, in fact, most of the gameplay. We run through the vast levels (labyrinths, caves, castles), we kill opponents, we collect the nishtyaks dropping out of them. In passing, we assign all kinds of bonuses, we climb to the secret places, we penetrate into the secret caves. In general, we are engaged in what the heroes of other games have been doing for already not the first ten years. And the classical tightness of some stages is also there. Locks Samurai bosses sometimes want to demolish himself, and not leave them merciless time ...

Spells - a cheerful appendage to the backbone of the gameplay. Enemies are perfectly defeated and without them, even the most evil boss can be hammered at least with a bare heel without any interference from the higher forces of nature. All these shamanism are just an attempt to diversify the rather monotonous wanderings of a small ninja. A total of various witches - 12 pieces, and forcibly forced to use only one and that just a few times. Another entertainment is alchemy. On the levels are scattered dozens of different plants - wildflowers, very common, lotuses that are found only in the water, high-mountain grasses, which are understandable where, rare mushrooms, without which do not weld the most magical, pre-magical potions. We collect them, and then cook. In the production of drinks everything is customary - from simple to complex. We start without any knowledge at all, then for coins (which fall out of barrels-chests) we buy recipes. In the beginning we know how to cook only potions of treatment and mana (which in the eastern manner is called Chi - we know this, yeah). Later we master the bubbles of the "shield from the arrows", the transformation into a fish, the restoration of health by the price of magic and so on. The value of all these fluids, in my opinion, is that they look very nice in the inventory. A hero with a large collection of magic potions is perceived as a universal soldier, who for every case of life has a definite answer. And against this background, the uselessness of all this alchemy seems to go to the background. For the whole game I did not have tonever drink a single elixir. It's strange, is not it?

Finally, the last important feature is six characters in the game. Ninjas move silently and without a trace . It seems that Hiro is alone, but his friends are traveling with him. We save them from the captivity of the evil samurai in turn, and then we can use their capabilities. The big-headed ninja wears a heavy hammer and hurts them, but he is classically clumsy. A kid with a bow aiming shoots, and a girl with a naginata perfectly copes with crowds of enemies. The only restriction - friends do not know how to use the magic of Coogee, and their special charged attacks are not particularly impressive. They can be called an analog of spells - you can use it, or you can forget it. Just another lotion for a change.

Mini Mini Ninjas- Strange. It seems that features are inexpressive (many are not very useful), and the backbone of gameplay has been embodied in hundreds of games for hundreds of times. There is nothing innovative or unusual. Many scold the game for the wretchedgraphics, which, however, is not at all wretched, but only simplified. Logically - to lower it into the floodgates, to the same inglorious clones, handicrafts. But no, the hand does not rise - do not want to delete, but on the contrary, pulls back into it. Probably, this is all a "good" color scheme, cute little animals and the eyes of the protagonist that radiate the friendliness. Even local villains and those are lovely. They are so funny shouting "Mini mini mini ninja!", That you do not even notice that you are stupidly killing them by the hundreds. In the game, even some special humor is not there - well, kicks the evil samurai of the guilty commanders, and those in fear try to escape and hide; well, all these voevods of our mini-hero are afraid, and thick bosses build funny muzzles and make surprised eyes ... Do you know what reminds you? Cartoons from the studio Disney . Bluntnaive, kind, bright, even if not very high-quality painted, but, nevertheless, very classy. There is some kind of internal energy that calls back, although some say: "for children" and "Count of the octa". Do not listen to them, but play - and be sure to have fun.