Posted by Ryan Johnson on 05 31, 2010

Ninjatown: Trees Of Doom!

Categories: Games, | 0 comments | |

Climb, leap, bounce, and swing your way up the perilous trees of doom! Ninjatown: Trees Of Doom!, created by Venan Entertainment Inc., is a cleanly designed and executed samurai twist to the popular category of endless climber games. In this game you’ve got to use your stealthy ninja skills to leap upward from tree to tree while avoiding progress yielding hazards and life ending obstacles and monsters. Fine tuned coordination and precise timing and placement are a must if you’re to compete on the global stage.

If you like Doodle Jump, or other endless climber games then you’re definitely going to like Ninjatown. To play the game well you’ve got to fight the urge to tap without thinking. To get your ninja climbing all you have to do is tap on the left or right side of the screen. Hold your finger down to keep climbing or tap your finger on the opposite side of the screen to leap over to the other tree. Each tree is lined with obstacles that you must avoid. There are tree bark-less areas that are slick and require constant side-to-side leaping to get past, gooey dark syrup and flying devils that kill you if you touch them.

As you’d expect from endless climbing games there are various skip aheads and power ups that help you shortcut the climb. Mushrooms serve as spring boards giving you an often helpful added bounce, tree branches serve as pole vaults launching you beyond areas that are too far to jump, bubble gum shields temporarily protect you from harm, candy smoke bombs help you vanish into thin air, and floating mustaches surge you up long distances like a hot air balloon.

Most of the time you’ll want to take full advantage of every skip ahead you can find, but at times you need to excercise caution because they can be neatly tucked along side death inducing hazards so one minor miscalculation and it’s curtains. Tree branches can be rather hazardous when used carelessly. When hanging on a tree branch you need to slide your finger downward like you’re drawing back a bow string. Depending on how far back you pull the branch it’ll launch you in three different locations. So if you let it fly without selecting the best option you’ll often be signing your death certificate.

Overall I really liked Ninjatown: Trees Of Doom! It’s a solid game that’ll keep you engaged time and time again. The graphics are good, the functionality and game-play are simple yet challenging, and for the price I feel like you get a good value. There was only really one area that kept Ninjatown from getting a top rating and that was originality. The game has it’s own subtly unique qualities (controls and characters), but by and large it has a lot of similar features and functionality to Doodle Jump so I had to dock it a full mark just for that. The only other thing worth mentioning, although it’s really minor, is I found the in-game music to get a little monotonous after a while, so adding additional music options in the future would be nice. But, aside from those two minor nit picks, Ninjatown: Trees Of Doom! is without a doubt a top notch app and definitely worthy of a spot on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

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