Atomic Ninjas

The online multiplayer-only genre is such a minefield for developers.

If your game doesn't pick up a multitude of players from the get-go it's destined to drift along for eternity, the occasional player logging in, finding no-one, and logging out again.

Atomic Ninjas is perfectly enjoyable, and if you can get a group of friends to pick it up too you're laughing. But it's also completely devoid of players, and is likely to drift along with the rest of the online-only debris for months to come.

Gin and Atomic

Atomic explosions have erupted across the world, turning many of its inhabitants into lightning-fast ninjas.

Inevitably, these ninjas have taken to dipping and diving around battle arenas, vying to complete objectives, capturing points, and generally beating the snot out of each other.

You can't simply kill other ninjas by hitting them or using weapons on them - instead, it's all about knocking other players back into lava, lasers, and other deadly obstacles.

Atomic Ninjas is quite good fun. The action is fast-paced, silly, and consistently packed with ninja-beatings. Experimenting with various weapons and upgrades is entertaining enough, and levels are tightly designed so that you're always forced to take other players on.

There are plenty of elements to keep you playing, too. You can level-up your ninja team, unlocking new items, upgrades and ninja types along the way, and there are Ninja Trials to complete, achievements to unlock, and ranks to aim for.

The problem with having no single-player content is that it's pretty difficult to actually find a game - and when you do, there are problems with those too.

Ninjas will lag all over the screen, meaning you can't really tell when to hit the button to punch. It makes the controls feel incredibly floaty unresponsive.

This is obviously a massive problem in an online-only game, and it's super-frustrating when you finally get into it after five minutes of waiting only to find that one player in particular is zipping all over the place and gaining an unfair advantage.

For this reason, Atomic Ninjas is destined to fade away - which is a shame, as there's definitely a certain something here that just needs to be fully realised.

If you have a few friends to play with then Atomic Ninjas is a great way to spend an evening. If you're going into it on your tod, I advise you not to bother.