Michal Ždanský It was 1997, when the world first saw a new electronic phenomenon – the Tamagotchi. On the small display of the device, which also fit on the keys, you took care of your pet, fed it, played with it and spent several hours with it every day, until finally everyone got tired of it and the Tamagotchi disappeared from consciousness.
Back to 2013. The App Store is full of Tamagotchi clones, there's even an official app, and people are once again spending a ridiculous amount of time caring for a virtual pet or character, plus spending extra money on virtual items and clothes. Here comes Clumsy Ninja, an almost forgotten game that was introduced with the iPhone 5 and we got it more than a year after it was announced. Was the long wait for the "coming soon" game from the creators of Natural Motion worth it?
The fact that the company has earned a place on the podium next to Tim Cook, Phil Shiller and other Apple people says something. Apple selects unique projects related to its iOS products for keynote demos. For example, the developers from Chair, the authors of Infinity Blade, are regular guests here. Clumsy Ninja promised a unique interactive game with a clumsy ninja who must unlearn his clumsiness by gradually training and completing tasks. Perhaps it was the big ambitions that delayed the project for a whole year, on the other hand, it fully met expectations.
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After starting the game, you find yourself with your Ninja in an enclosed area of rural (probably ancient) Japan. Right from the start, your master and mentor, Sensei, will start throwing simple tasks at you from the context menu. The first few tens are quite simple, as a rule, you will rather familiarize yourself with the game and the interaction options. It is the pillar of the whole game.
Clumsy Ninja has a very well-developed physical model and all movements look quite natural. So our ninja has the appearance of an animated Pixar character, yet the movement of his hands, feet, jumps and falls, everything seems as if he is acting on the real earth's gravity. The same applies to objects around. the punching bag is like a living thing, and the recoil sometimes knocks the ninja to the ground when he gets hit in the head with a ball or watermelon, he staggers again, or trips his legs with a lower throw.
The collision model is really elaborated down to the smallest detail. Ninja calmly and unintentionally kicks a passing chicken that got involved in his training with barrels, trips over a watermelon that was under his feet while fighting with a boxing stick. Many more serious games could envy the physics refinement of Clumsy Ninja, including console ones.
Your fingers act like the invisible hand of God, you can use them to grab a ninja by both hands and pull him, throw him up or through a hoop, slap him on a success or start tickling him on the stomach until he can run away with giggles .
However, Clumsy Ninja is not just about interaction, which would tire of itself within an hour. The game has its own "RPG" model, where the ninja gains experience for various actions and advances to a higher level, which unlocks new items, suits or other tasks. Experience is best gained through training, where we are offered four types – trampoline, punching bag, bouncing balls and boxing shot. In each category there are always several types of training aids, where each additional one adds more experience and game currency. As you progress through training, you earn stars for each item which unlocks a new grip/move that you can then enjoy while training. After reaching three stars, the gadget becomes "mastered" and only adds experience, not money.
One of the unique elements of the game, which was also presented at the keynote, is the actual improvement of your ninja, from a non-motor to a master. You can really see gradual improvement as you progress between levels, which also earn you colored ribbons and new locations. While in the beginning, landing from a lower height always means falling backwards or forwards, and every hit to the bag means a loss of balance, over time the ninja becomes more confident. He boxes confidently without losing his balance, grabs the edge of a building to land safely, and generally starts landing on his feet, sometimes even into a fighting stance. And although there are still traces of clumsiness at level 22, I believe it will gradually disappear completely. Kudos to the developers for this upgrade-on-the-move model.
You also get experience and money (or other items or rarer currency – diamonds) for completing individual tasks that Sensei assigns to you. These are often quite monotonous, as many times they just consist of completing training, changing into a certain color, or attaching balloons to a ninja who starts floating into the clouds. But other times, for example, you'll need to put a raised platform and a basketball hoop next to each other and make the ninja jump from the platform through the hoop.
Platforms, basketball hoops, fire hoops or ball launchers are other items you can buy in the game to increase interaction and help the ninja gain some experience. But there are also items that generate money for you once in a while, which is sometimes in short supply. This brings us to a controversial point that affects a large portion of games in the App Store.
Clumsy Ninja is a freemium title. So it's free, but it offers In-App purchases and tries to get users to buy special items or in-game currency. And it comes from the forest. Unlike other tragic IAP implementations (MADDEN 14, Real Racing 3), they don't try to shove them in your face from the start. You don't even know much about them for the first eight levels or so. But after that, restrictions related to purchases start to appear.
First of all, they are exercise aids. These "break" after each use and take some time to repair. With the first ones, it's within minutes that you'll also receive some free fixes. However, you can wait over an hour for better items to be repaired. But you can speed up the countdown with gems. This is the rarer currency that you get on average one per level. At the same time, the repair costs several gems. And if you're missing gems, you can buy them for real money. You can sometimes make a correction per tweet, but only once in a while. So don't expect to spend long intense hours at Clumsy Ninja without having to pay.
Another pitfall is buying items. Most of them can be bought with game coins only from a certain level, otherwise you will be asked for gems again, and not exactly a small amount. When completing tasks, it often happens that you need just the tool for them, which can only be bought from the next level, until which you still lack two-thirds of the experience indicator. So you either get them for valuable gems, wait until you reach the next level by practicing, or skip the task, for a smaller fee, how else than gems.
So quickly the game starts to play on your patience, the lack of it will cost you real money or frustrating waiting. Fortunately, Clumsy Ninja at least sends notifications that all items have been repaired or that they have generated some money for you (for example, the treasury gives 24 coins every 500 hours). If you are smart, you can play the game for 5-10 minutes every hour. Since it's more of a casual game, that's not a big deal, but the game, like games like it, is addictive, which is another factor to make you spend on IAPs.
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Clumsy Ninja is not a classic game, more of an interactive game with RPG elements, a Tamagotchi on steroids if you will. It's a great example of what can be invented and created for today's phones. It can keep you entertained for long hours broken into short chunks of time. But if you don't have the patience, you might want to avoid this game, as it could get pretty expensive if you fall into the IAP trap.
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I enjoy the game a lot, but I find orientation in space quite challenging - especially when jumping on platforms; I think the creators could have done the same with the platforms as with the trampolines, that after tapping on the trampoline he climbs, not that you have to get him there yourself.
Excellent entertainment. Physics, animation, gameplay and humor are at a very good level. Only the leveling is terrible, if I were to play it honestly, it would take me 2 years to get through it.
IAP? I always play?
In-app Puchases – other in-game micropayments.