Review

Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodge Ball

There has been a long running argument about which are better, pirates or ninjas and there is now, finally a means of determining the winner. Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodge Ball will give all who have been tearing their hair out over this quandary conclusive evidence that Pirates indisputably own ninjas. Yes, that’s right, I said it. Pirates will wipe the floor with ninjas any day of the week. But you know what? Robots could give the pirates a run for their money. And as for ninjas vs. robots, it’s a sad state of affairs, because there is no competition there, robots own ninjas.

Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodge Ball (PvNDB for now on) is basically a less violent means of settling who could kick whose butt if they duked it out question. PvNDB is a game that could be on par with Galaga in how addictive it is, for a less hardcore game. It is a bit lacking in depth, you could actually beat the whole story mode in less than a few hours. The story mode would be the draw for its difficulty in playing and beating every level, but the story is not going to be something to exclaim over. It’s cute and amusing in some parts, but generally un-extraordinary. But don’t let this stop you because you’re probably not playing it for the story, I know I certainly wasn’t.

Where this game truly shines is in the overall fun factor, if not always the gameplay. Actually the main problems I have with this game are not so much its gameplay, because I think it plays really well, with no noticeable faux pas. The glaring and irritating blunder in this game falls more into a design issue (I’ll come back to that later). The dodge ball games can be played with from two to four players on each team and there are three game types: traditional dodge ball, enhanced dodge ball, and combat dodge ball. Traditional uses the more traditional rules, where there is a line down the center of the field, and you generally have to stay on your side of the line. Enhanced dodge ball lets you cross over into the other team’s side for a limited amount of time. When your time is up, your stamina drops, and you won’t be able to move for a short while. Combat dodge ball is by far my favorite and probably the most fun. In all three game types, you can attack the other players, but in combat dodge ball, it is much easier to do. There is no dividing line, you just pummel your enemies with red balls, and then frequently beat the snot out of them for possession of the ball.

There are four teams, pirates, ninjas, zombies, and robots. The robots wipe the floor with pretty much anyone they come up against and are the most frustrating opponents in story mode. Next hardest would have to be the pirates, which is surprising because you’d think that ninjas would be more agile and therefore better dodge ball players, but this is not so. The pirates wiped the floor with me a number of times before I managed to beat them as ninjas. As for he zombies, I can only scoff at them. They are the most God-awful dodge ball players to ever have the gall to drag themselves onto the field (or out of the dirt). Their only redeeming factor is that their special attack is better than the ninjas. As a ninja my main special attack was turning into an outline, which did me minimal good (if any at all), but as a zombie you get a couple really cool ones. One attack lets you summon up a zombie dog to fetch a ball from somewhere on the field, and the other attack lets you dive underground and pop up wherever you direct yourself. The pirates have an exploding sand attack that is pretty cool, and the robots…Well they just got the silver spoon in special attacks. They have freezing attacks, they have what looks like a floating saw attack, and one of them can hover around and knock you on your back.

Think no more of delusions of grandeur as a pirate or ninja, be a robot, androids are where it’s at. Of course the robots may have an unfair advantage: their level is darker, with red lines going through it (the friggin ball is red)! You can’t make out heads from tails in the robot or the zombie level because they’re so dark. This is what I mean by a design issue. And another issue is identifying yourself and your teammates. You can’t harm your teammates but darn if I didn’t try to maul them many a game, thinking they were the other team. It doesn’t help that one of the ninjas looks like a robot and that one of the robots looks like a little like a pirate. Plus the identifier for yourself is a yellow “1” that floats near you, and that’s it. A lot of the time not being able to figure out who you are compounds the problem of not being able to identify your teammates. On the good design side, the targeting system works very well. A red circle appears on the ground under you when you are being targeted and a blue circle appears under the enemy you are targeting. If something as clear could have been used to identify your character, the ball, and your teammates, then this game would have been nearly flawless.

As it stands, even with this frustration, I still managed to stay glued to the controller. The overall graphics are pretty good, nothing spectacular. The sound, though, is very good and the music for each level fits the game really well, and doesn’t get annoying after listening to it for a looong period of time (cough, robot level, cough). I would recommend this game as one of the more fun and addictive arcade games, despite its few fallings.