Far more aggravating than the art style would have you believe, this game requires the player to execute a number of rapid attacks in the span of a few seconds in order to beat each level.  Despite how much I think about it, another, similarly fast-paced game doesn’t come to mind; another game like this one simply doesn’t exist.  If you are looking for a fresh platformer that will challenge your skills, you’ve found it.  Also you get to kill Nazi robots from space.  Did I mention that yet?

Everything in this game is pretty simple and fluid.  If you play this on a keyboard, you’ll be using the arrow keys and the ‘z’ and ‘x’ keys.  The ‘z’ key allows you to throw one of the three shurikens you’ll have per play.  Hitting ‘x’ allows you to make a katana attack, which is so fast that there is only a flash of steel and then nothing.  Shurikens aren’t the best way to kill enemies but they allow you to attack from a distance and even kill multiple enemies at once.  It’s not terribly fast, but you can use them to kill numerous enemies while you take out the rest of their friends.  Double-tap the up button and you can double-jump.

The remainder of all their lives comes down to the most disappointing 10 seconds ever.

Luckily for players, the enemies are not a crew of enemies that you feel bad for.  First off, their robots, so they’re not really people, second they’re Nazis so they’re not even human.  Plus explosions are cool.  This game follows a history of asian folk heroes killing evil robots in the fashion of Samurai Jack.  Of course, this little ninja literally takes maybe a couple of minutes to do more damage than Jack accomplished in an entire season.  Granted, ninja were never supposed to use katanas either, but let’s try to stay focused here.

Each level has three stars, and if you try to get them all, you will tear out every follicle of hair your possess on every surface and orifice of your body.  The first star is usually pretty simple – get better than 8 seconds.  After than it gets ungodly hard right fucking quick.  From there you will have to knock up to about 2 seconds off your time.  After that, half a second.  The only time I ever got 3 stars was when I somehow managed to win in 3.98 seconds.  There were only 3 robots on that level.

I took a picture and it DID last longer!

There are also bosses, but they are really all just Robot Hitler, but you have to defeat various versions of him.  Actually, they are all the same Robot Hitler, but some times he wears a party hat or something.  Cut-scenes explain the scenarios, what is happening and why he would be dressed that way, but it’s really just all the same robot psycho.  Overall, this is a good game, but it requires a certain talent.  If you can sit down and beat this game, congrats, go make a YouTube video about it.  Seriously, someone probably made a 10 minutes speed run of them beating this game in its entirety while getting all the stars.  Clearly there is a lot to challenge you, and the game’s actually is a lot of fun and really satisfying when you can finally get that last star, but there is no way I am going to replay it a million times to squeeze out the last fractions of a second.  You have to jump over spikes, run across collapsing platforms and god knows what else when you get further along.  At 9.99$ I would say go for it, but grab a controller or you are going to be groaning a lot over lost fractions of a second.