Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is a triumphant return to 2D for the series, a tribute to its origins, and proof that The Game Kitchen can handle a license with this much historical weight without losing its signature style. It's fast, challenging, varied, and visually stunning. A great side-scrolling action game with well-designed mechanics.

Ninja Gaiden Ragebound might not be the hardcore challenge of the past, but it's one of the most fun and best-looking retro action titles we've had in the last decade.

The quintessential ninja makes his triumphant return to his roots with The Game Kitchen as developer, offering a spectacular audiovisual experience and polished, action-packed 2D gameplay. One of the best in the genre.

As a midpoint in the Year of the Ninja, the Spanish studio delivers a great experience that all Ninja Gaiden fans should experience, and I imagine more than one person will have Ragebound in mind when it comes time to choose this year's best games.

Ninja Gaiden Ragebound hits like a shot of espresso to the brain — sharpens your senses with its pixel-perfect jumps and gets your heart pounding through the acrobatic carnage delivered by the two excellent protagonists, Kenji and Kumori. Still, the absence of Ryu Hayabusa is definitely felt.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound masterfully translates the fast-paced action the series is known for into a modern retro title. Thanks to beautifully detailed pixel art, a modern mission structure, and excellent level and boss design, it not only succeeds in letting you relive the Ninja games of the previous century, but even surpasses them. It certainly doesn’t play like Ninja Gaiden on the NES did, but perhaps like how you remember that game through the rose-tinted lens of nostalgia.

This superb 2D action-platformer by The Game Kitchen perfectly blends fast-paced gameplay, exceptional level design, and striking pixel art to deliver a thrilling and deeply nostalgic experience, though its progression system is underused and a few vehicle levels fall short of the rest.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is a pitch-perfect action game that revitalizes the long-dormant Ninja Gaiden franchise, smartly calling back to its 2D roots. For a series that was known for brutal difficulty before it became a household trend, it’s wonderful to see a developer like The Game Kitchen use their own expertise to translate decades-old concepts so expertly in the modern day. Blistering speed and challenging, satisfying combat are the hallmarks of any great action game and Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound does not disappoint.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is an excellent return to one of gaming’s longest-running series. Its action is non-stop and challenging without becoming unfair, while the platforming remains fast and highly responsive. Though it grows a bit repetitive toward the end, this doesn’t take away from its successful modernization of the classic Ninja Gaiden formula.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is an excellent re-invention of Ninja Gaiden. It’s bursting with amazing pixel art and pitch-perfect platforming. The combat and movement have a fun flow of jumping and slicing with an aesthetic that captures the retro feel of its source material while connecting it to its more modern contemporaries. Some may find the boss encounters frustrating, but the feeling of victory still makes this a ninja adventure worth taking.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound delivers everything a classic-style game should have—fast-paced, intuitive, and challenging gameplay. It’s highly replayable, encouraging players to improve their performance with each run. While it has a few minor flaws, they’re easy to overlook given everything else it brings to the table.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is very exciting and addictive with its fast-paced action and challenging gameplay. I really missed a fun action game with a cool retro pixel-art style like this.

Ragebound shows a great deal of respect to Ninja Gaiden’s legacy while being unafraid to try out some new ideas. It looks great, sounds great, and plays great. I just wish it respected the player on the same level as its predecessors, as its low difficulty and high player dictation is somewhat offputting for a longtime fan like myself.

NINJA GAIDEN: Ragebound is a great modern interpretation of 2D ninja action and although it can range from tedious to frustrating at times, the core of the experience remains exciting, tight, and action-packed.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is a spinoff that revitalizes the series and the genre with its callback to its original side-scrolling gameplay. With well-crafted levels, dynamically engaging combat, and gorgeous pixel art, it uses the simplicity of the side-scrolling gameplay to its maximum potential. It has a few flaws here and there, like its short runtime and balance near the end, but is otherwise a great way to keep the hype for the series’ upcoming title.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is as crisp as it gets. The game combines precision and timing to build the perfect balance: the challenges are hard enough to get in your nerves, but you still find yourself repeating them over and over again, always sure that the next try will be the one.

NINJA GAIDEN: Ragebound offers a compact campaign, where visual diversity and intense dynamics are hidden behind apparent simplicity. The game itself is perceived as an almost flawless prologue to NINJA GAIDEN 4.

Ragebound brims with an invigoratingly maximalist B-movie attitude. But that over-the-top sensibility is undergirded by confidently minimalist design.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is a successful experiment in blending past and present, combining Tecmo's legacy with the auteur vision of The Game Kitchen. It's not perfect, and perhaps not the masterpiece some were expecting, but it's a solid, entertaining title—artistically inspired and technically well-executed. A return to its roots that doesn’t just look backward, but manages to say something new using the language of the classic.

Don't be afraid to take on this Ninja Gaiden imagined by The Game Kitchen. While the name of the license may make you tremble, Ragebound has more than one talisman up its sleeve to ensure that all players find pleasure in it, from the brave young Genin to the invincible Jônin. Very pleasant to play, both technical and fun, it is pure arcade fun like we rarely see. With a little more inventiveness in its level design and some better exploited ideas, it would have reached the coveted rank of Ninja Master. Ryu can in any case be proud of Kenji, his protégé defended the house very well in his absence.

It's like a trip back in time, taking you back to the 90s in a demanding and difficult experience that never feels unfair or artificial, with modern controls and methodologies that make it incredibly energetic. It's highly addictive.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound brings the series back to its roots with incredible style. The core gameplay feels fantastic, with satisfying, fast-paced combat and platforming that'll put your skills to the test. With a wealth of challenges to meet and things to find, there's a real richness to each level that gives it plenty of replay value. The wonderful art style is the icing on the cake, and aside from one or two small nitpicks, fans should be very pleased with this throwback adventure.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is a tightly packed platformer that heartily succeeds in realizing what Ninja Gaiden is and ends before it can even begin to waver. By prioritizing tight controls and deliberately crafting levels that push players to take full advantage of them, it’s able to resurrect 2D Ninja Gaiden without all the rage-inducing nonsense that’s better left in a bottomless pit. And The Game Kitchen does this while also injecting its own ideas and style into the game so it’s more than a simple retread of past concepts. Ragebound embraces history and modernity, and, in the process, sets up a promising future for Ninja Gaiden as a whole.

A fun restatement of the Ninja Gaiden 2D formula, that is just complex enough to engage both new and old fans, while being surprisingly accessible in terms of its difficulty level.

In adapting the soulslike formula that made them so successful with the two Blasphemous titles, the guys at The Game Kitchen have demonstrated a full understanding of what it means to develop a 2D Ninja Gaiden: their Ragebound is a game to be enjoyed at full speed, seamlessly alternating between attacks to cleave through enemy hordes and the precise leaps required by demanding platforming. The excellent momentum of the initial episodes is unfortunately lost in a repetitiveness caused by a lack of variation, while the few missions available leave the title's longevity dependent on the individual player's desire to obtain the highest ratings in each mission. Like the gameplay, the level design quickly ceases to surprise, falling back on the genre's well-known leitmotifs without ever adapting to the diverse scenarios showcased by an otherwise inspired art style, which boasts contemporary 2D graphics and a soundtrack that is decidedly suited to the frenetic nature of the gameplay.

A dazzling dose of ninja nostalgia, with a soundtrack so good it could be the best of the year.