Released exclusively for the Sega Master System in 1990, The Cyber Shinobi is a sequel to the first Shinobi, but it’s not really a sequel many will remember. Mostly because it isn’t very good…

You play as the grandson of ninja master, Joe Musashi, who is also called “Joe”. Your mission is to defeat the forces of “Cyber-Zeed“, a futuristic, terrorist army founded by the remnants of the original Zeed organisation.

You must fight your way through six different stages, to stop Cyber-Zeed from launching a bunch of nuclear missiles, and destroying the world.

The Cyber Shinobi looks okay in screenshots, but the gameplay itself is unfortunately second rate, compared to the previous Master System Shinobi (or any of the other Shinobi games for that matter). Character movement, scrolling and animation are jerky, and the in-game action itself is weirdly unsatisfying.

The controls are horrible. To throw a shuriken, or fire a shot, you have to hold down fire and push up; to make a high jump you have to push up diagonally and press jump, and to activate your Ninjutsu magic you have to press buttons one and two simultaneously. The result of this is that you’re going to struggle to perform these actions, because most of the time they don’t work. The jumping action, in particular, I thought was really hit-and-miss and annoying. In a game as challenging as this, you can’t be having flaky controls… But that’s what you get.

Making progress extremely difficult are some very unfair, hidden traps, like the collapsing floors on stage two, and the scissor attack by jetpack enemies on stage three. I’d hate to play this game on real hardware, as I’d be absolutely tearing my hair out…

Levels also stop scrolling in some places, until you’ve defeated a certain number of enemies (similar to as seen in Double Dragon, Renegade or Final Fight), and the game then allows you to continue again. Which I found to be out-of-place in a Shinobi game.

Another gripe, is the fact that most (if not all) of the sprites in the game have black boxes around them, which makes the game look amateurish.

In my opinion, Sega really dropped the ball with this one, and I think anyone who boots it up now is going to be scrunching up their face (in dismay) after just a few minutes of play. The Cyber Shinobi is unfortunately a Shinobi game to forget…

More: The Cyber Shinobi on Wikipedia