As most people probably know by now, the Nintendo Wii was littered by many crappy 3rd party games. There were many things that makes so many of the bad. Some of them have controls that try to use the Wii Remote to its full ability, but forget to make it work. Others have horrible graphics and overall quality put into the game world. And in the case of many platforming games that were bad on the Wii, it involved terrible cameras. And the game Ninjabread Man nails all of these issues right on the head, ending up as one of the most infamous games in the Wii library.


  
 Gameplay: 2 – So, what this game seems to be going for is some kind of platformer like Banjo & Kazooie, but fails in practically every way. The basic gameplay of the game is “exploring” the levels in search of finding 8 pieces to fix a machine, which is only used as a means to get to the next level. The game pretends like it has an open world, but the levels vary from a linear path with a split where you have to go from one path to the other, to just one big circle mess. The lack of a helpful map was eminent pretty early on as well, as it’s easy to get lost.


   It isn’t like the actual platforming is good either. One level is pretty much a joint of similar looking rooms with random mushroom-like objects around. Nothing interesting; it’s all copy and pasting here. Other levels aren’t much different. There is nothing to change up the gameplay at all. It’s the same bland thing all the way through.


   Difficulty: 6 – The game provides very little challenge in the sense of level design and fair enemies. The real difficulty in this game is fighting the horrible controls and camera. Starting with the camera, it feels the need to swing around randomly, and does a really bad job of showing depth, resulting missing the platforms half the time because you simply couldn’t tell how far way it was.


   The other half of missed platforms were mostly because of the terrible movement. The speeds are standing still, barely tilting the control stick for crawling speed, and then SUPER SONIC SPEED. Running off edges or slipping down badly designed sloped edges is always a possibility in Ninjabread Man. There’s no real good way to move around. The super fast moving combined with a bad camera means a lot of frustration while just moving around.

   
   When it comes to simple things like jumping and attacking, you would think a simple button press would be all you need. And you would be partially right, at least with jumping. To jump, the game tells you to shake the Nunchuck upwards. This works maybe 50% of the time, but only 25% or so of the time it will actually respond right when you shake. And then trying to double jump this way is harder. Luckily, jumping can also be done pressing Z, although the game doesn’t tell you this. Without using it, the game will be nearly impossible to beat with just the horrible waggle motions.


   The other horrible control scheme in the game is the way you attack. To do this, you would shake the Wii Mote. Unlike something like Super Mario Galaxy, where it was great at sensing when you were actually shaking, Ninjabread Man cannot do this at all. It somehow feels even worse to try to attack with the Wiimote than it is jumping with the Nunchuck. And even when attacking, there’s such a long delay before you can attack again, enemies will destroy you when ever trying to use this attack in battle. Using your long range attack is the only real way to be able to get through the game.

   
   The thing is, even with all the horrible controls that this game provides it’s still not a very difficult game. With only 4 levels (3 minus the tutorial), if you use Z to jump, and avoid enemies at all cost and just fire long range, it is not a hard game whatsoever. You will have a frustrating experience no matter what, because of the terrible camera and slippery edges on platforms, but I got through the game without ever losing a life pretty easily this way.



   Graphics: 1 – Before I go into the graphics, I want to mention that this was released on the PS2 a few years earlier. And even by those standards, the game looks horrible. The levels are so similar to each other; you neither can feel progress going from level to level nor can give your eyes a break from looking at the puke-like textures that are all over the place. Every level has the same enemies as well. The only thing that doesn’t look like garbage is Ninjabread man himself. Sure, he doesn’t change his facial expression, but in a game this bad, it’s pretty much all there is to compliment. Too bad they put 90% of production time just making that one model.


   None of the animations look good either. The enemies that fire at you don’t really have a clear animation to show when or even if they are shooting. The attacking animation ticks me off, too. When you swing, you have about 5 pixels worth or range, and about a half second of time where it can strike an enemy. But the animation makes it both seem like you have much more range than you really do, but also, you will be vulnerable to a hit because of the lag after swinging, which is the main reason that this attack is so useless.




   Addictiveness/Depth: 2 – Like I mentioned earlier on, the game only has 3 real levels plus a tutorial to play through on the main game. The main game took me no less than an hour to complete. The levels themselves not really all that bad in terms of how long a level for this game should be, although it just drags on and on since they feel the same all the way through. However, if you do manage to fight your way through, you can unlock new modes. None of these are anything that would make the game more playable, because they just throw you into the same exact levels, with one of two bad additional modes.

   
   Time Attack is one of the unlocked modes, and it is exactly what it seems; play through the game with a time limit. Another mode is Score Pickups where you go through the same levels just like the normal, game, although with the additional luggage of finding a ton of candy pieces sprinkled throughout the level. Basically, you collect useless pieces of candy to make this game somehow even more tedious and boring. Neither of these modes brings anything remotely different or fun to the game and you certainly will not want to go back to these. Apparently, there is a third game mode after completing one of the other modes, but it is surely as bad as the others.



   Sound: 7 – Strangely enough, the music in this game does not suck. Obviously, with a game that takes an hour to beat, the sound track won’t be massive, but the songs that are in there are not the worst thing ever. They probably are not songs you will listen to every day, but definitely not bad. It does loop quite a bit, though. So eventually listening to the same song over and over will become tiring.



   Story: 4 - If you just had the disc to this game, there would be no story. The entire story is presented on the back of the box. Absolutely nothing throughout the game gives you any hint of story, and the sudden stop that happens at the end of the game without any kind of boss or anything different at the end. It just goes back to the title screen after beating the last level.


   So, anyways, here is what the story is. Candy Land (very creative) is being taken over by cupcakes, bees and jelly monsters. You must stop them from taking over. It is nothing special, although it isn't a game that you need much story, because it would just make the pain longer anyways.


   Overall: 1.5 – A quick thing to point out, this game seems to be exactly the same as another game the company made, Anubis II, and there seems to be a third one as well that was literally the same thing, with just a different character and level textures.


   So, by now you know this game stinks, and the developers knew it to. So, it would be logical that a few months after release, the company, Data Design Interactive, announced a SEQUEL to the game! The game never released, thank goodness, but the fact that it was even considered is actually laughable.


   This game does nothing right. The graphics look like Ninjabread man puked all over its horrendous landscape. The depth in the game is rivaled by average Atari 2600 games. And worst of all, the game controls worse than anything I've ever seen. The game was clearly never tested. There is no way something like this could have been played through with somebody thinking “Yup, this is the sign of quality!” Saying to stay away from this game like the plague is an understatement.

Dude, I love this review, especially how it's all set up with the formatting and the layout. The entire thing, the length, all of the detail, make this one heck of a review. I have never played this game beofre, and if I ever get a chance, I guess I should turn it down. I would have never expected a game to receieve such a bad grade, like for the graphics.

Keep up the awesome reviews, but maybe for a good game next time?

I agree with zander, here the layout and the formatting are excellent. I looked at the game page and immediately saw graphics that looked like it was some kind of N64 game, while the PS2 and Wii have way better graphics. 

It can be hard to review an awful game, but you did a good job. Most games are awful because of their bad gameplay, and that's what you told about a lot. It's a game I've never played or have seen, but I can understand everything you're saying though.

Keep up the good work with your reviews patar

zanderlex :  Thanks for the compliments on the layout. I spent a whole 5 minutes making it.  

juuldude : See what I said to zander on the layout. Thanks, I appreciate it, dude. It took me more energy to get started on it than normal since it has been so long since I've made a review. But I'm pretty happy how it turned out.

SUX2BU : Forgot to summon you at first. You said you were interested.

Oh, I'm sorry, I thought it would only take 30 seconds, I revoke my previous comments.