A bitter pirate, an army of robots and a ninja. What more do you want from a story? That’s the small amount of players in Four Circle Interactive and Curve Digital’s PlayStation 4 release 10 Second Ninja X. It’s an action/puzzle game that asks you to think before you move. Also, you have 10 seconds to complete each level. No pressure, right? Wrong.
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The basic premise of game is this — you play as ninja that has to destroy all the enemies on a level within 10 seconds. If you die, the game ends. If you run out of time, the game ends. The joy of this game is having the courage to press any button to get the level started and test out your cat-like reflexes over and over again until you beat the level and score a good time (which equals out to 1-3 stars, depending on your performance). Those times are posted on a global leaderboard, so as to give you possible motivation to keep getting better.
That’s motivation I just didn’t feel, but a better gamer than me would probably feel challenged enough to repeat the process.
The crux of this game is the level design and how to use your wits (or in my case the lack thereof) to get to every robot as quick as ninja-ly possible. The beauty of the game, outside of its simplistically cute animation of ninja, enemies and robots, is how the levels are put together and where enemies are placed. Sometimes you’ll have enemies behind untouchable fields/obstacles, which will require you to use one of three available shuriken. Sometimes you’ll have the enemies out in the open, but are forced to make a complicated jumping pattern to complete the level. There are a lot of simple factors to consider when trying to complete each level. The level designs are frustratingly ingenious and developer Four Circle Interactive should be loved/commended/slightly hated for keeping the design in the game interesting.
Again, choose your strategy before jumping off into the 10 seconds of absolute mayhem.
As much worrying as 10 Second Ninja X might garnish from its time limitation, Four Circle Interactive does a great job of keeping all the extra worries out of the equation. They make the control scheme simple with O controlling the shuriken throwing, X controlling the jumping and square controlling the sword slashing. They forgive players jumping into enemies, but not obstacles (like an electric fence of sorts), so literally your main focus the majority of the time will be getting through everything within the given timeframe. It’s glorious in both goals and controls, so you won’t have a problem in those areas. 
Having said this my only big issue with the game is how it goes from 0-to-60 in the difficulty range without properly doing a slow climb. Granted, this game makes no bones about its challenge, but the lack of curve in the difficulty arc does pose a frustrating problem, especially if you’re not expecting it. For loonies who love a game like Dark Souls, you will be right at home. For the rest of us that live our frustrations through colorful words and calls of damning to the heavens, you’ll quickly ask the kids to leave the room by the end of the first set of stages.
In other words, you have been warned.
