The biggest gets in the collection currently are titles like Mortal Kombat 11, Soul Calibur 6, Injustice 2 and Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid, which are all part of the PS+ Extra tier priced at $15 per month / $100 per year. Considering we live in a time when it’s surpassingly easy to download and play those games, I don’t get why you’d want to bother with imitators like this when the real thing is only a few clicks away.From our count there are just under 30 fighters in total available across the different subscription tiers with a mixture of recent and classic games. And that’s why I don’t see the point of Ninja Senki DX’s existence: it aspires to nothing more than to borrow liberally from those old games, without in any way building on them or looking at them in a different light.

I do think, however, that if you’re going to draw so heavily from those old games, it should be in the service of something more ambitious than simply imitating your influences and calling it a day. And to Ninja Senki DX’s credit, it’s a pretty pitch-perfect imitator in every respect, from the simple controls, to the basic graphics and chiptunes music, to the insane level of difficulty. I lived through them then, so I know that’s not the case. I’m not going to look at those old games through nostalgia lenses and pretend that they were perfect the first time around. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, of course. It’s just a really, really hard platformer that would’ve been right at home on the NES. There’s no unique twist there are no interesting new mechanics. It borrows liberally from Mega Man and…well, that’s pretty much all it does.

Like, if someone were to tell me that the game really was from 25+ years ago, and that some enterprising developer had just grabbed the old source code and dumped it onto the PSN, I’d have no trouble believing that. It’s just that Ninja Senki DX is a retro-inspired platformer that doesn’t seem to have anything new to say. And I don’t want to give the impression that it’s a bad game, by any stretch: it’s perfectly adequate in every respect. I mean, I get that Tribute Games apparently decided to mark the fifth anniversary of one of their old games by polishing it up and re-releasing it on the Vita, PS4 and PC. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why Ninja Senki DX exists.

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