I’m almost sorry this game is getting a 2 out of 5…  Almost.  Truth be told, Ninja Reflex is a very charming little game that can be entertaining at times.  Trouble is there’s just not enough game to spread around that forty dollar price tag.

Hey, you’re that Ninja!

Much like those Brain Training games or the upcoming Wii Fit, Ninja Reflex is being positioned as a title you’d want to play in order to improve yourself somehow.  In this case, it’s your reaction time.  Each of the six mini-games is set up to measure your hand-eye coordination and raw reaction time down to .001 of a millisecond.

The premise is that you’re learning to become a Ninja.  After choosing an appropriately stereotypical ninja name, you hook up with your sensei who instructs you in the ways of the ninja while endlessly spouting all kinds of eastern philosophical mumbo jumbo.  You’ll listen to this exactly once.  After that, as soon as he starts talking, you’ll jam on the A button to shut him up. There’s a certain charm and polish to the presentation.  Ninja Reflex looks genuinely good for a Wii game.  The environments are pleasing and everything animates nicely.  It’s clear that a lot of love went into the art direction here, and I just wanted to point that out before the next paragraph.

Become a Ninja in Six Easy Steps

Let’s talk about those six mini-games.  You’d think that with only six, they’d all be good, right?  Sadly, that’s not the case.  The shuriken toss works quite well as does a nifty little game that has you plucking flies out of the air with a pair of chop stick. I swear I saw that on an episode of Kung-Fu.  The absolute best of the bunch is the Koi Pond game where you hover your virtual hand over a pond teaming with fish in the hopes of grabbing any breaking the surface.

Two other games, Katana and Nunchaku, attempt to mimic the moves associated with those weapons. They wind up being too difficult because the Wii Remote gestures aren’t always read correctly by the game.  The last mini-game simply has you taping the A button any time you see a firefly on the screen – clearly the worse in the pack.

At least this is better than Naruto

To be fair, each of the six mini-games has several difficult levels that you must work your way through on your path to earning a black belt.  Those later levels are ridiculously difficult.  It’s almost as if the developers knew the game has no legs and they were looking for some way to pad the experience.

Like all good mini-game collections, you and up to three of your friends can have at it to see who has the best reaction time, but you’d be hard pressed to call it a competitive experience. What’s really odd about Ninja Reflex isn’t the presentation (we like it) or even the mini-games (they’re ok).  It’s the positioning of it as a reflex training tool.  Isn’t that what nearly every action-oriented video game on the planet already does? Ninja Reflex would be better served to beefing up the amount of gameplay and ditching the “training” motif.

Gag Reflex

If you absolutely need to have every single collection of mini-games for your Wii, at least the content in Ninja Reflex is entertaining.  There just needs to be a lot more of it to justify the price.

Review by: Greg Bemis