Fun For Free – Shotgun Ninja

Sometimes in this day and age, I feel that we forget what makes a game. You always hear reviews knocking games for not looking like Gears of War or sounding like Super Mario Galaxy. You’ll hear reviews complaining about the shallowness of a plot or underdeveloped characters. But in my mind, for a game to be good, all it needs to be is fun.

If you are looking for one of those flashy games, you won’t find it here. However, if you are looking for an awesome pure-gameplay experience that features both a ninja AND a shotgun, then you’ve found it.

Shotgun Ninja is a fairly straightforward platformer by Cactus, an excellent Game Maker user. The game features a ninja that uses acrobatics (including a walljump!), a shotgun, and grenades to defeat his foes and get to the exit. The game has a point system that rewards you for kills, shots fired, grenades used, etc. And basically that’s all there is to the game: try to get points and get to the end of the level.

The graphics are based on classic gaming systems, or computers, like the Atari and Commodore 64. I really like when indie games take the NES or SNES graphics approach, but I wasn’t really sure about Atari-style graphics. However, in this case, it really works. It just further emphasizes gameplay as the most important aspect of the game. And it has chiptunes as music! Chiptunes are basically the ultimate video game music.

Anyway, despite being short (only eight levels long), it’s one of the most fun indie games that I have ever played. And like Banana Nababa, I assure you that you will have to play levels multiple times to beat them.

And guess what? You’ll have fun doing it.

Download Link
Cactus Soft