Amiga Power


Dragon Ninja

Author: Stuart Campbell
Publisher: The Hit Squad
Machine: Amiga 500

 
Published in Amiga Power #8

Dragon Ninja

"Enjoyable and challenging" says the box of this game, and it's half right. Dragon Ninja is a game in the Kung Fu Master tradition of simplistic scrolling pseudo-beat-'em-up action, and this conversion looks remarkably close to the coin-op it's, er, a conversion of.

By some quite inexplicable lapse of concentration, though, the programmers have somehow *forgotten to include the jump function*...! While this isn't too crucial in the first stage, it makes the second one (where you have to leap across the sections of an articulated truck) pretty much impossible.

You've got no option other than to fall down the gaps, lose a life, ten jump up onto the next wagon and do it all again. If you're really good, you'll have one life left for the third section, but the same kind of problem crops up there too and that's you knackered.

If it worked, Dragon Ninja would be a tolerable enough potboiler, but it doesn't and that's that.

The Bottom Line

Respectable conversion of duff game ruined by a quite unbelievable programmer cock-up. Did anyone ever play-test this? And why didn't any reviewers notice? What's the world coming to? Literally unplayable past level one.

Stuart Campbell

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