Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound review

Well, this is a nice surprise. Previous Ninja Gaiden games have been about as warm and welcoming as being booted down a flight of stairs. But Ragebound has pulled off a fun revival that’s far and away the most accessible Ninja Gaiden yet. And by ‘most accessible’ I mean ‘it waits a few hours before repeatedly kicking you in the face’. Hey, it’s a start.

The studio behind Blasphemous obviously knows its pretty pixel art and violent action. What’s new is its discovery of lightning-quick pacing. It's slammed an adrenaline shot into 2D Gaiden and made a game that’s far more interested in keeping your murderous momentum up than just repeatedly killing you. Enemies leap on screen and you’re encouraged to slice them in two before they’ve even finished their intro animation. Ideally you’re doing this while constantly sprinting forwards and with your next target already in your swords’ sights.

You play as Kenji, a student of usual protagonist Ryu Hayabusa, who’s apparently too busy starring in the very first Ninja Gaiden to help out here (I suppose that’s fair). Kenji’s got a basic sword slash attack, throwing knives, and a Sonic-esque bounce that both hurts enemies and lets him use them as handy makeshift platforms, so at least they don’t die in vain.

Once you unlock the shop you can buy a talisman that restores health on each kill, as long as you have at least a +3 kill streak going. Buy this immediately. It’s the missing piece that makes the game absolutely sing as a ninja vampire sim, encouraging you to slice your way through levels as swiftly as you can. Speedrunners are going to have a ball with this one, and mere mortals like myself had a pleasant time too.

The story is nonsense, of course, involving unwise demon pacts, the CIA, and a construction site run by ninjas. You’re soon forced to team up with Kumori, a lady ninja from the rival Black Spider clan. Kenji and Kumori’s prickly relationship is a lot of fun, with Kenji constantly calling her out for the Black Spider’s apparent moral inferiority, and Kumori preferring to tease Kenji for thinking pirates are cool. Awww.

Together you slay your way through villages, mountains, navy bases, and… a sewer level? Tsk tsk. Well, at least the linear campaign is too restless to ever keep you in one place for long. Essentially it’s a series of kill chains and platforming challenges, with the occasional pause to figure out a mild puzzle (usually nothing more complex than how to slaughter everything more efficiently).

Ragebound rushes you through the campaign too swiftly for repetitiveness to ever truly sink in, but no one’s going to accuse its moveset of being complex. It’s actually kind of novel to play a game in 2025 that puts a sword in your hand and then doesn’t have a parry mechanic. I liked the glowy enemies that, when properly dispatched, gave me a massively overpowered strike immediately after. And the special ability to temporarily freeze time is probably the reason I saw the credits.

Still, Ragebound lacks a killer idea to truly call its own. The novelty of its set pieces, like a battle aboard a runaway train, or being chased through a construction yard by a demon driving a bulldozer, stick in the memory far more than how I fought my way through them. Swordplay in two dimensions enjoyed a bit of a renaissance last year with games like Nine Sols and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Ragebound’s fighting is fun but doesn’t reach those giddy combat highs.

Fans of the original games who’ve been spitting blood at this review since I used the word ‘accessible’ earlier will be pleased to know Ragebound eventually becomes an asshole. The last trio of bosses are brutal affairs that test every skill the game’s taught you (the excellent final boss is particularly good at this). Then there’s the optional challenges. Some are reasonable, like killing a set amount of a certain enemy. And some are preposterous, like asking you to defeat a boss without being hit, or in under a minute. Oh how I laughed at the latter proposition after sixty minutes of uninterrupted failure.

Then there are the secret levels, which you’ll find under a tab labelled SECRET LEVELS (stealth was never this series’ strong suit). These are far more hardcore, with some of the checkpoint placement apparently done by Satan while he was in a particularly foul mood. If a tougher challenge is what you want from a Ninja Gaiden, you’ll find it here.

Not always one that plays fair, mind. You’d likely have to be clairvoyant to get through some of Keumuri’s sections first time. And the tracker that tells you how many kills you’ve chained sometimes doesn’t show up for work. Hugely infuriating when you’ve got that aforementioned talisman equipped that grants health back for keeping it in play. It’s also not above the occasional cheap death worthy of its NES predecessors.

I still almost always enjoyed the seven-ish hours it took to see the main game (and there’s plenty more if you dig into the ‘secret’ stuff). Blasphemous’ self-serious tone takes a welcome backseat for a silly ninja romp, and like a lot of people, The Game Kitchen turns out to be a lot of fun when they stop droning on about God. I’d love to see what they could do with a more ambitious sequel.