Something About A Ninja

CyberDrive Ninja has quite the slow start, but once you make it past that there's a fun, short game here. The download that made it out is a demo that covers chapter 1, and I played for about an hour. Unfortunately, it stops right as you become the CyberDrive Ninja! You get to see the basics of how the game plays, the story setup, and a taste of this game's stylish aesthetic. Although it uses the RPT Maker VX RTP style for most of its graphics, there's little touches like the neat UI and some comic-book like transitions that add some personality.

The game actually opens with several splash screens and a brief animated trailer advertising itself, which I found weird, but charming. This was pretty much my feelings on the whole thing -- there's a lot that feels clunky to play, but despite that I had a fun time and would have been interested in playing more.

The little bit of the plot you get is fairly straightforward: you're a police detective in Delta Bay City. During what seems like a routine investigation into a drug case, you uncover a plot involving crime bosses and, of course, ninja assassins.



After an explosive opening, you take your first mission and... go shopping. That's the thing about the pacing -- there's this weird bump in the beginning where you do some random things before you're allowed to get in on that stealth.


Before you can be a ninja, first you have to beat a guy's high score in Tetris.


The first mission itself has a slow start too, as the game very much holds your hand through it. I was playing on Normal mode, so perhaps this isn't the case on higher difficulties, but I was told right where to go and didn't exactly have to think about what my next move was going to be. The stealth itself was rather easy too, but again, that may have been the result of playing on Normal mode.

It's fairly standard stealth mechanics, where you hide in the shadows and avoid patroling guards, but with the slight addition of wearing a disguise at first. When spotted by guards, initially they'll come up and check you, but if your disguise is checked too often then your cover is blown. Although it was a nice addition, you have to be careful in general, because it's possible to get yourself trapped in a corner and repeatedly checked/attacked with no way to escape. There's also QTEs but uh, I couldn't complete any of them. Both the timing windows and icons for what button to press were rather small, making those harder than they probably needed to be.

While most of the game functioned fine and the worst thing I found were some passability errors, watch out! Pressing F12 to reset will crash the game. I also found a cutscene that seemed to get stuck for me, but thankfully I was able to skip it and keep going. No idea what that was about, as I couldn't replicate the bug.

You get two boss battles in the demo, each with their own gimmick. The actual combat is straightforward -- A to fire your gun when you have it, and then A/S/D to use melee attacks of varying strength once you get a katana. (Sidenote: At one point I had a katana and janitorial clothes as my equipment, which was a wonderful combo.)

I was a little bummed that the demo ended right as I got the ninja suit. That's the nature of demos, though, to leave you wanting more! Seeing as how it appears to have been 4 years since this page saw any activity from the developers, I doubt we'll see the finished game, but hey, there's an interesting idea here and a short demo. It may not be the best example of a stealth game, but I had fun with it and maybe you would too.