When Eastasiasoft announced their Tiny Pixel series of games inspired by arcade and console classics, I didn’t expect the first one to be a straight up vertical shoot em up! The acorn hasn’t fallen far from the tree. Whilst this budget shmup may run out of enemy variation a little too quickly, it does something quite cool with its difficulty curve.
In Ninpo Blast you are riding a hoverbike with two shooting attacks – a focused powerful attack and a weak spread shot. I must say the focused attack was where I spent 90% of my playtime because as you upgrade it, you can add multiple bullets which gives it a little more spread. The goal is to survive 20 waves of insectoid enemies and at the end of each wave a randomised boss from an eventual selection of six will spawn. You need to dodge the enemies and their fire by zipping around the screen and if you need a quick escape, the katana special attack clears all standard enemies from the screen and their enemy fire in a pinch. Controls are solid, predictable and fluid and the collision detection is too.
Each upgrade you earn through collecting cogs in Ninpo Blast is permanent. It could be making your weapons more powerful, adding some health, unlocking a new boss or a new background image or hoverbike (they all handle the same – its visual changes only). In doing so, the game also levels up its enemies. What used to fire one or two shots now fires more. Bosses have more things to dodge or avoid. The swarms of enemies arriving starts to get a little bigger. Its subtle at times but Ninpo Blast makes the earlier waves slightly harder as you progress and improve your character and its a really good piece of game design. It means you can’t overpower and breeze through the game by grinding for upgrades – you need skill at all times. Once the upgrades are all unlocked, the game reaches its hardest mode and that’s when the online leaderboards really matter most. The level design does have some variation but not much and so scores can be largely compared on merit.
It’ll take about 2 hours to get most of the upgrades unlocked and during that time you’ll be enjoying the gameplay but wishing there were a few more enemies to tackle. As its such a narrow screen (which can be flipped 90 degrees for a pretend Tate-like mode if you want it), it doesn’t take many enemies firing things for you to get caught up in chaos. Enemies come from all directions with helpful arrows marking roughly where they’ll arrive from. Often one single enemy will pop out from the bottom of the screen during a big attack from the top and kill you if you aren’t paying attention. Ninpo Blast is a bit cheeky like that – most of my deaths came from sneaky distraction design or from a specific boss that locks on and fires projectiles at you from all sides. It isn’t crazy hard but you’ll always be on your toes and death comes quickly with almost no invincibility time between deaths. I just wished there was more going variety rather than just more of the same coming at you faster.
With solid gameplay, technical build and a really nifty difficulty adjustment curve that grows the game with you as you gain upgrades, Ninpo Blast is solid if unspectacular. You’ll likely grow tired of it before you complete wave 20 but genre fans will find fun in the online leaderboards. I hope the Tiny Pixels series lets Eastasiasoft try out some new things in future volumes though – they’ve cornered the budget shmup market already!
Review copy provided by publisher. PS5 version tested.
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