It’s 2015 in Tokyo, and the city faces a scourge marginally more frightening than the hordes of imported English teachers it has to deal with today. That’s right, a KILLER MUTANT VIRUS is making bloody, messy work for helicopters full of trained assassins and Hollywood extras. And…well, that’s all you need to know to predict the rest of Ninja Blade’s cost-cutting storyline.

You’re in control of Ken, a likeable ninja-from-the-future with all kinds of ninja tricks he can use to wow friends and loved ones at parties. His Ninja Vision ability (a finite resource assigned to the right trigger) paints the screen red and blue, where the splashes of blue indicate items/structures that you can use, enemies’ most vulnerable points, and so on. This function also slows everything down — and in a game that’s as hyper as this one, any slow-motion respite can be pretty useful.

For someone who should be chopping infected flesh like a crazed surgeon, Ken seems to spend an inordinate amount of time simply running around. He can even run along walls and up the faces of buildings. And when he’s not running, he can often be found leaping or flying. Result: Ninja Blade feels unexpectedly like a 3D platformer. Levels are built along straight tracks without much scope for exploration; the only breaks come during mutant extermination and fights against ridiculously huge boss monsters.

Ninja Blade’s biggest gimmick, though, is its overuse of quick-time events. It’s fun the first time, slightly less so the second and third, and completely irritating by the 786th time Ninja Blade bombards you with its overenthusiastic QTE-ing. The thing is, you’re not even risking much during them. If you mess up, the action just rewinds a few seconds and you try again. They’re truly fun only when it comes to finishing moves, where you need to press an arbitrarily assigned button to land the killer blow at the end of a string of attacks. That’s pretty satisfying.

Despite its flashy razzle-dazzle, Ninja Blade feels surprisingly shallow. It’s not particularly long (you can see everything in less than 10 hours), and the novelties it wants you to like, it shoves in your face quite rudely many times over until you just want it to go home and stop leaving messages on your phone.

On Xbox 360

+ Quick, flashy mutant-slicing ninja action.

- Not enough breathing room for exploration.

- Way, way too many quick-time-event cutscenes.

? Tell us they didn't have Uwe Boll write this script…please?

6.5