Review – Shinobi: Art of Vengeance

Developer: Lizardcube | Publisher: SEGA

As someone who has never touched a Shinobi game before, and generally speaking has barely dipped their toe in metroidvanias, I wasn’t sure what to expect with Shinobi: Art of Vengeance. It’s a metroidvania-adjacent game with a hand-drawn art style and fast paced combat. It’s the first Shinobi game since 2011 – so how does it hold up?

After its initial release, there were a lot of complaints on the Nintendo Switch version. It had problems with the resolution, which were amplified on the Nintendo Switch 2’s 1080p display. I received my copy shortly after the new patch, and it looks like those issues have been completely resolved.

The hand-drawn art style is sublime in both handheld and docked. As a player it drew me into the world of Shinobi: Art of Vengeance. The enemies are well designed, ranging from armed combat men, to monsters, demons and ninjas. Combined with the delectable art style, the game had a retro feel with a modern control scheme and response time.

The combat starts of with one or two simple combos to learn, and I was almost concerned that learning future moves might require me to become some kind of fighting game guru. Fortunately, this was not the case. The new moves are drip-fed to the player and, even if you don’t remember the combos exactly, it still benefits you having them in your arsenal. Occasionally I’d accidently pull off a new combination resulting in a powerful move, and it would naturally come to be part of my move set moving forward.

Every fight and battle along the way felt great. Whether it was a common enemy or a boss fight, I was engaged with the task at hand to take them down and reap the benefits of the coins or health they would drop. Oh, did I need that health sometimes.

Shinobi: Art of Vengeance offers a challenging yet fair campaign. If at all you perish throughout the level or in a boss fight, it doesn’t feel like a crushing defeat. Instead it’s an opportunity to improve, to get a little bit further or to take out a an extra portion of that boss’ health next time. Throughout my time with Shinobi, I only found one boss I could beat first time. By that point I had felt myself considerably improve throughout the game and I had a better arsenal of moves and abilities at my disposal. That’s not to say the game got easier, by all means the game kept my on my toes the whole time, but although the enemies, stages and bosses were scaling with me, I still felt as though I was improving and getting more powerful.

If difficulty isn’t your thing, Shinobi: Art of Vengeance offers a variety of accessibility features to assist in your enjoyment despite your level of experience or additional needs to enjoy this game. For example, enemy damage and defences can be reduced by 50%, as well as the respawn conditions if you are defeated.

The levels are designed with metroidvania-like maps in mind. There are additional abilities that can be obtained as you play through the game which give you reason to go back to prior levels and explore new areas and take on new challenges. It’s not enough to call the game a metroidvania in itself, but the elements are there for those who enjoy the genre and will get a kick out of it.

It’s hard to find fault with Shinobi: Art of Vengeance. The game is well designed from enemy encounters, to player movement and map design. There is occasional platforming that feels frustrating, but once again the game masters the art of teasing the player in the right way, that feels as though you are always making progress. The narrative is a weak point but arguably isn’t the reason you approach a game like Shinobi. It’s a drive to take you from level to level, following a story of revenge after Joe Musashi’s home is destroyed by the evil Ruse.

I sincerely hope the Shinobi drought is a thing of the past. With the resolution problems that were presented on the Switch now a thing of the past, Shinobi: Art of Vengeance is, in my opinion, a must-have game for your Nintendo Switch library. This is my first experience with the series and now I feel compelled to go back and play the older titles. After getting to the end of the game, I couldn’t just leave it alone. I had to go back and begin my journey to 100% to find the hidden secrets, additional combat challenges and complete the map for each level. If you’re even a little bit tempted to play this game my advice to you is to buy it as your earliest convenience.