Pros: Vaguely Naruto themed (only a pro if you enjoy Naruto), free to play, web browser accessible
Cons: Repetitive grindy gameplay, poor graphics in places, very buggy, awful game performance
Score: TBD
We took out some time to try Joygames’ beta of their new hero team building strategy title, Clash of Ninja, a free to play browser title set in the world of popular anime Naruto where players get to gather together various popular ninja characters from the show and face off against some equally popular bad guys. The game focuses on mostly PVE orientated battles, with elements of PVP later in the game, unfortunately after a few hours of playing we didn’t get the chance to check out PVP but otherwise managed to get a decent idea of what the game is offering.
First stepping into the game we were introduced to our own village, essentially a typical city building strategy elements where we had to pay to upgrade different buildings so that they would churn out resources at a greater pace and yield; resources that would then go towards upgrading the ninja characters we acquired to be candidates for our team. The primary gameplay revolved around gathering resources and ninja, using these resources to make our ninja stronger, and then working our way through the different content that would over time grow more difficult.
One of the key elements about the game is that it is near fully automated combat; the “strategy” is building a strong squad from your available collected ninja, keeping them upgraded, and choosing their position in the squad formation. There wasn’t, at least as far as we could tell, any sophisticated formation mechanics outside of the norm e.g. there weren’t special bonuses for having specific characters together in the same formation, or having certain characters fill a specific slot, it was considerably more simplistic and focused on front line and back line combatants. Once you enter combat your ninja just start attacking the enemy in turn, using their available abilities and building up their ultimate attack which deals lots of damage, heals up allies, various skills depending on the character; when the ultimates get used is the only interaction we got to have during a fight and we had the option of going full-auto and letting the computer just trigger the ult when it was available.
For a while (the majority of our play through in fact) most of our combat experience was had through the Campaign mode, a linear series of Stages where we’d face specific enemies, meeting new ninja to defeat and recruit, and importantly acquiring particular loot items unique to that stage (i.e. the same type of items would always drop from the same Stage). This last point is fairly important as it is one of the key ways of upgrading your ninja characters outside of spending resources to upgrade their levels and skills; the “Evolution” system required us to obtain six different loot items for each ninja, with each ninja having their own specific loot item requirements, and equipping them to the character. Some characters might require the same item which would mean having to complete a stage multiple times to get it for the different ninja; once all six items were equipped we could “Evolve” the ninja to make them more powerful, which in turn destroys the equipped loot items and tells you the next six items to get for the next Evolution stage.
The result to this kind of mechanic was constantly having to fight over the same Stages, which didn’t really matter as most of the battles essentially felt the same anyway; whether the enemy was doing a flying headbutt attack or breathing a fireball at us, with no control over the actual combat ourselves it was all just slightly poorly drawn graphics that dealt damage. More frustrating was that the enemies of each stage appeared to just use the same series of attacks each time; going into a stage we knew which order both our ninja and the enemy would attack, which powers they would use, how much health we’d have and, ultimately, whether we’d be able to win.
We kicked the ass out of everything we’d come across, particularly when we got Naruto on our team so early on as part of the quest chain, whose ultimate seemingly just solo’s the enemy, then suddenly we’d hit a wall where we were suddenly too weak to advance down the campaign. This would typically mean we just hadn’t kept on top of upgrading our ninja every five seconds and now this enemy was too strong; but a few minutes spent eating Ramen to level up our characters and spending Coppers to improve our skills, or arduously grinding previous stages we’d already done to get items and Evolve, then we’d be strong enough to advance. Basically when entering a battle the game simply checks your squads Battle Rating and if it isn’t high enough then no amount of non-existent tactics can help you; it is essentially pre-determined what BR you need to be at as to whether you can clear a stage or not… and so the tedious grind begins.
We got a brief glimmer of a different feature called the Misty Battle, here we had the chance to move around a world map connected by various nodes where we’d pick up treasure on different paths and could generally choose our own direction as to where we wanted to explore to. According to the website the premise is that the PVE challenges grow tougher the further you travel from your village; we wouldn’t know as the game bugged out and our Squad became “Busy” and we couldn’t move them anywhere (we still have no idea why they were busy or how we could change it).
Buggy is pretty much our main experience with the game, the poor performance meant slow loading times and loading screens, it means attacks happening in battle that lagged behind so we didn’t see the animation but suddenly lost or dealt lots of damage, it was menus half loading up or being unable to close them. Worst of all was the battle freezes; once we’d loaded into a battle both sides would just stand their idle with nothing to do other than quit the fight (which meant losing Stamina) and then trying to jump back into the fight and it still not working; relying on a browser F5 hard refresh to try and fix the problem. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t, but as it started to get to the point where every other match was freezing it all became too much; it was a big complaint on the forums, it was something the developers knew about and had hours later responded to in the news section to say they were looking at it, but really it was just the tip of the iceberg for the problems we experienced.
Overall our time in the game wasn’t particular enjoyable, the game is a rehashed copy of practically every other team building strategy in the genre, only with less features and a Naruto theme (which will no doubt appeal to the Asian market that seems to love these types of grindy browser game). For us there just weren’t enough features up front, shallow story-line, tedious repetition of stages and generally nothing that felt fresh or innovative.
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