In keeping with the rest of the game, the narrative in Ninja Blade is an absurd mishmash of zombie movie tropes and bog-standard mystical ninja bullshit. It's enjoyable in a B-grade kind of way, what with the over-the-top dialogue and hammy voice acting and what-have-you.

Speaking of voice acting, one weird thing I noticed is that certain characters will occasionally switch between Japanese and English for no discernible reason. You father/sensei, for example, spends the entire opening cut-scene speaking Japanese, but then talks to you in English for most of the first level, only to switch back again at the end. Ninja Ken does it a few times at well, randomly swapping his boisterous HELLYEAHBRO one-liners with incongruous snippets of softly-spoken Japanese. And before you ask: no, it's not because he's speaking to different people. Half the time, he's talking to himself.

That oddness aside, it's hard to fault Ninja Blade's audio. The music sounds a bit like Metal Gear Solid: derivative but well-produced spy-techno that's easy to listen to and completely unobtrusive. Graphics are at once slick and unimaginative, with most levels taking place in detailed-but-dull Tokyo cityscapes such as subway tunnels and rooftops. Similarly, boss monsters are enormous and well-animated, but utterly generic. I mean, really – a giant crab? Right after a giant spider? That's just lazy.

But even with all the flaws I've just described, I'd be lying if I said I didn't like Ninja Blade. As I said before, it's genuinely hard not to enjoy something so deliberately and self-consciously ridiculous. And to be honest, although the game is far from excellent, it never gets so bad as to make you want to stop playing altogether. You'll get annoyed, and you'll probably walk away from it more than once – but you'll never give up completely. 

I didn't.

FINAL SCORE: Ninjas!