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When you consider that the majority of Ninja games are crap (Shadow Dancer and The Last Ninja series being obvious exceptions) it's a wonder people keep writing them. Dragon Ninja is also guilty of deserving the C word. Now some might say that if it's a budget title, it doesn't matter. But when someone goes through hell playing a tedious game, I really don't think they'd say, "Still it was only a complete waste of three quid."

The graphics in this horizontally scrolling beat-'em-up are pretty good: nicely defined hi-res sprites, well animated over a backdrop that is itself competently drawn. But, and it's a big but, it suffers like so many games of this type from poor collision detection. There is simply no feeling of contact when you punch an opponent and when that's the essence of the whole game, all the excitement is lost.

To be honest it's not a complete disaster and there are much worse games around. But I'm just a bit tired at the prospect of yet another mediocre game of such similar structure to all the rest.