You stop as the monster falls before you. That slime creature was tough, but as a ninja, you’re used to facing unfavorable odds. You know your enemies are going to start swarming you again soon, but it seems like there’s a brief lull in their offense, so you decide to take inventory—see what you have to work with.
Your trusty kunai? Check. Obsidian sword? Check. Landmines? Check. Rocket boots? Check. Batteries? Check, you never know when you’ll need some batteries. Satellites? Check.
…What? No ninja worth their salt would ever leave home without some satellites. Everyone knows that!
The Work of Ninjas
Developed by MONSTER PLANET Corp., Super Ninja – Survivor.io is one of many games of a genre people started calling “survivor-likes” due to the inspiration they take from the widely acclaimed title Vampire Survivor in their design and gameplay.
Developers often take after popular titles, and when they improve on the original idea, innovation happens. However, Vampire Survivor itself came out on iOS less than a year ago, so Super Ninja Survivor has quite a high standard to measure up to. Can it hold its own?
With A Little Hissing
Super Ninja Survivor, like many of its genre, is a pixel art game. It uses mostly plain colors to get the job done, which makes any situation simple to read… unless there is too much happening on-screen, at which point things often tend to blend together. By the nature of the genre, that’s almost all the time. Luckily, clarity isn’t necessarily important when you’re playing as a living bullet hell mowing down thousands of monsters.
The sound design leaves something to be desired. The soundtrack could best be described as “being there”. It gets the job done, it fills the silence and it’s not bad to listen to, but no track will end up getting stuck in your head and that’s a guarantee. The sound effects are similarly functional, up until your bullet hell starts going crazy and the sounds become just a little bit too annoying. It takes a while to get used to the beeping of landmines three times every second. Regardless, if it gets too distracting, sounds can always be turned off.
Hurling, Hitting, Holding, Locking
If you’ve played a survivor-like before, you know the gist of how this goes. You spawn into a stage that quickly gets filled up with monsters. Due to a lack of variation in enemy behavior, they all end up simply magnetizing towards your location. Your only hope of survival is to defeat them, pick up the experience crystals they drop, level up and pick or upgrade weapons in order to defend yourself with bullet hell shenanigans. Once a weapon is fully upgraded, you can combine it with a passive effect to evolve it into something much more powerful.
Games like this can live or die by their weapon roster, and Super Ninja Survivor is somewhat lacking in that regard. During my time playing, I found a total of roughly sixteen different weapons. That might sound like a lot, but since you can have up to six weapons each run, they quickly start repeating themselves. Most of them aren’t that interesting either. Very few go beyond “deal area damage around you” or “shoot stuff in random directions” even in their evolved forms.
Bring Your Ninjas
Super Ninja Survivor features an inventory system found in many other similar mobile games, allowing you to get passive benefits during gameplay. Instead of choosing a character though, you choose your starting weapon by literally equipping it. By default, it’s the kunai, but if you prefer the katana or even the laser gun, you have the option to start with those as long as you acquired them somehow (mainly from lootboxes).
When you start a new run, your first job is to level up as fast as possible to build up a weapon roster you’re comfortable with. Weapons and passive effects are offered at random and you can only have up to six of each, so choose carefully. You cannot reroll your options or delay making a choice, so sometimes you’ll unavoidably get a subpar loadout.
Each run lasts eight minutes (plus menu time), not counting the time you spend defeating bosses. After two minutes, you have to face the first boss—usually a predetermined one depending on the stage you’re playing on. Four minutes in, a “big enemy wave” appears, then at five minutes another boss. The seventh minute brings another big wave, and reaching eight minutes lets you confront the final boss of the stage. The bosses themselves are hit or miss. Some of them are tolerable, but a lot of them spend too much time being invulnerable. Depending on your loadout, especially against the first boss, beating them might take a long time.
One With The Universe
Like most mobile games (except, ironically, Vampire Survivor), Super Ninja – Survivor.io has microtransactions. This is standard stuff. Buy in-game currencies to spend on upgrades. Buy a premium subscription to remove all the ads you are otherwise forced to watch. We’ve all seen it before. The prices are passable, although the bigger bundles are clearly designed with whales in mind. The monetization is actually so standard that there isn’t really much else to say about it.
My biggest gripe with Super Ninja Survivor wasn’t even the game itself. The gameplay is fine, even if it could be improved. My biggest problem was the optimization. Maybe it was just the devices I tested on, but no matter what, sooner or later, the game would unavoidably start lagging and chugging at a very low framerate while ignoring inputs, inevitably causing me to lose the run. A device more powerful than I can get my hands on might be able to avoid this problem, but it’s not like I tested on decade-old hardware, so gamers beware.
Super Ninja – Survivor.io is a spin on the now-classic formula. Get weapons, upgrade weapons, evolve weapons, become the bullet hell nightmare of the hordes of enemies that show up to defeat you. But it often misses the mark. The weapons, even upgraded, often don’t make you feel unstoppable, even by the end of a run, which should otherwise be the point of such a game. The ninja aesthetic isn’t explored much beyond the main character and a few weapons. On top of that, if you don’t have top-of-the-line hardware, the whole game might just kill you with faulty optimization, making it all the harder to be a survivor.
