This was my first time playing a PSVR game like this, one that was based it’s value solely on the device’s tracking and motion controllers. I was a bit skeptic when it was first loading up, but within the tutorial my concerns were both put to rest and validated. The game itself plays a lot like Fruit Ninja. You stay stationary, only able to rotate by turning your head, and targets are thrown in your face until you destroy them. The main difference here being that you are now expected to block attacks that are coming at you from almost 360 degrees. Oh, and of course, your targets are evil ninjas that you can now chop into several tiny pieces. Yes, it’s as fun as it sounds.

The Good

The overall game play loop is incredibly fun and addictive. It essentially breaks down into this: Complete one level, fight a boss, unlock a new weapon, onto the next level. Each level takes only a few minutes to beat, but I don’t recall ever actually being bored with it’s repetitive nature. Playing in a group seemed to be the best way to play. Verbally yelling out our own personal scoring of each other’s ninja skills, worked way better than the online scoreboard that was provided.

The combat itself is glorious for this type of game. Several ninjas rush you at once so it’s up to you to keep track of everyone around you, deflecting their strikes as efficiently as possible. Enemies flank quickly and can get behind you if you’re not paying attention. Luckily, time slows down giving you time to parry each attack. Most of the time, these attacks come in the form of enemy blades, but once in a while a ninja star will come flying at you. Blocking the star in just the right way sends it right back to the thrower.

The rag doll body effects, as well as the dismemberment, are fantastic. Nailing a successful strike will sometimes reward you with legs or arms flying in every direction, portions of heads flying off, and even the upper torso going vertical after a quick spray of blood. One of my favorites was slicing the enemies in half, from head to groin, and then watching each half crumple to the ground into two separate piles. The enemy designs are a little too polygonal for my taste, but overall it wasn’t hard to overlook.

For the most part the environments are pleasant to look at. Most are stereotypical of any ninja or samurai movie that’s ever been made, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The colors are exceptionally vibrant, increasingly so in the mission entitled “Ambush at Dawn”. The sunrise bathing everything in shades of red can’t be beat.

The Bad

Ninja Legends does have it’s fair share of problems. The main one being the inconsistent tracking. Normally I wouldn’t attribute this to the game, however I can honestly say I’ve never had motion tracking that was this hit or miss. This goes for the motion controllers and for the VR headset itself. I changed my room layout and lighting several times, but nothing seemed to correct it. Even during the opening tutorial I ran into an issue that persisted the entire game, a notice appeared so close to my face I had to sit down, then lean back to be able to look down far enough to find the “next” button. Several times my in game height would alternate from being average to a 10 foot tall giant.

I did run into several enemy AI glitches that were rather frustrating. Some would run around in circles in an attempt to dodge my projectile attacks, and they would get stuck in their pattern, endlessly running in circles until I restarted the mission. This wasn’t an every few minutes issue, but it persisted several times over my first session of a few hours.

If you’re not a fan of arcade style games, this will probably get a little repetitive for you. Now while I will say that I didn’t find myself getting tired of it, I can definitely see where this could become a problem. The overall weak AI doesn’t help as enemies just charge in your general direction over and over again throughout each level, so the only variety you will see is the environments and a few different types of enemies.

The Verdict

Ninja Legends is a good time that almost anyone can enjoy. How long before it gets repetitive is the more important question. Repetition is not always a bad thing, however for $25.00 I would’ve hoped for a little more, especially with the inconsistent tracking that is the backbone for VR games relying on motion controllers.

The racer isn’t all that’s tiny.

There’s a commonly seen phenomenon in video games journalism where reviews never give a score lower than six. This leaves review scores in a mathematically unusual position. Rather than showing a game’s percentage ‘goodness’, with 5 being a perfectly average game, the score makes any game look good at a glance, with the mapping realistically reflecting 10 being perfect, 6 being bad and anything less than 6 being atrocious to a level that merits exceptional treatment. Now would be a good time to refer to the score I’ve given Tiny Racer.

On first impressions, there’s nothing to complain about. Tiny Racer is an arcade racing game, inspired by the likes of Micro Machines, Re-Volt and Mario Kart. It has a heavy emphasis on physics-based action and a cute cartoony aesthetic, complete with comic book style 3D “Pow”, “Wham” and “Thump” pop-ups whenever there’s a collision. Unfortunately, though, the chasm between the Tiny Racer’s first impression and the gameplay itself is so yawning that it could accommodate every unwanted copy of The Da Vinci Code ever bought, or something less voluminous, like the sun.

I don’t entirely understand Tiny Racer. Arcade racers are fun because they’re not fair. They have items which allow you to cheat massively and rubber banding so strong that a slingshot in their universe would be regarded as a weapon of mass destruction. This leaves you in a position where anyone can play and expect to do reasonably well, having a lot of friendship-ruining fun along the way. It’s the reason why Mario Kart is one of the most popular party games ever made.

Tiny Racer’s arcade gimmick (and the only thing that separates it from a pure racer) is its extreme physics. There are no items, pick-ups, boosters or anything else you’d expect from a standard arcade racer. However, rather than that gimmick being balancing and fun, allowing players the choice between taking a risky manoeuvrer and potentially suffering the wrath of the physics or taking a longer route that’s less perilous, the physics are insane, unpredictable and, frankly, really irritating. You’ll go flying off cliffs, crashing into walls and other vehicles and sometimes just flip over with no rhyme or reason to why any of it is happening.

What’s worse is how unoptimised the physics have been for the AI. They don’t seem able to deal with it at all. They’ll crash constantly, taking you with them. I played a race where one car was driving in circles over the start line for the entire race, still there every time I finished a lap. When you respawn after falling off the track (again), you spawn above the track and are dropped back into the action. However, when another car falls in the same place at the same time (which happens all the time, again, the AI can’t deal with the physics engine) you’ll both spawn in the same place, which the physics is woefully unequipped to deal with so it just sends you both pinging off, at incredible speeds, to opposite ends of the map.

Other glitches I encountered include: choosing to play as the muscle car but spawning in as a van, broken multiplayer controls when using two joycons and more misplaced invisible walls than that time I worked as a glazier for Loki the Trickster God. The game also has very few tracks, only three modes and nothing else to encourage replayability. It didn’t take much more than an hour to ‘complete’ the game and experienced everything it had to offer, including all the glitches listed above.

One last nit-picking comment: Why is it called Tiny Racer? The game clearly wants to conjure images of Micro Machines and Toybox Turbos, but those games have Micro/Toybox in the name because they play with scale. You’re racing tiny cars around tracks built to a real-world scale, looping around all the junk stored away in the attic or a kitchen midway through making a Sunday roast. Tiny Racer is entirely to scale, the cars are on the same scale as the tracks and the backgrounds. There is nothing tiny about anything. Having ‘Tiny’ in the name makes about as much sense as the career and popularity of any given Kardashian.

Somewhere deep down in the development brief for Tiny Racer there is a glimmer of a good idea, but, unfortunately, a good idea on its own does not make a good game. A poor physics engine, uninspired gameplay and glitches up the wazoo make Tiny Racer difficult to redeem. If you want an arcade racer to play with friends, Tiny Racer is several continents away from being in a position to compete for Mario Kart’s throne.

You can watch them, indulge in their idiosyncrasies, but whatever you do, do not feed the monkeys. 

Joining the secret and exclusive society ‘The Primate Observation Club’, you, as a digital stalker of sorts, are given a set of surveillance cameras that let you into the lives of some very unsuspecting and interesting individuals. The developer, Fictiorama Studios, based the concept on Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and an actual website featuring live and insecure security cameras, and it is perhaps unsurprising therefore that it’s conveyed through a dark-humoured lens, aiming to show the bizarre lives and decisions of those ‘captive’ to your attention with an appealing pixel art style.

Your society provides you with a pyramid scheme goal of purchasing 5 more cameras – or ‘cages’ – every 5 days, while you also have to work part-time jobs to pay for your rent, food and well-being. This whole review could be spent trying to explain the bonkers concept that must have been imagined on some sort of hallucinogenic, but strangely, it works really well.

You have to discover the stories behind the camera, picking up clues, piecing them together and researching them on the internet. Every story has someone/something in need of help in some way, and with your investigation you are able to contact the relevant people involved and help the ‘monkeys’, getting rewarded if you are able to do so. If you aren’t able to discover how to contact someone involved, then an unfortunate fate may befall them. Gaining information forms mind-maps in your notebook but they are far from linear, offering player agency as to where your search heads and different endings to each individual story, some of which are based on moral decisions. 

As an example, upon learning about the profession and hobbies of a janitor stuck in an elevator of an abandoned building, you are able to find his telephone number on the internet and call his wife, but she, thinking you are from the press to talk to her about her missing husband, won’t talk to you until you can prove you are one of his friends. Once convinced, she calls her lawyer (who’s also the lawyer for company who owns the abandoned building) who then tries to bribe you to keep your mouth shut and to leave the janitor to die. Ignoring the camera altogether also results in grave consequences.

Everything about this game’s tremendous concept screams innovation and originality with each camera’s story told excellently over the pacing of the game’s day. The actions you take for each are also completely different, wildly surprising and very entertaining. 

While your bizarre primate-monitoring hobby initially gives you a strange feeling of omnipotence, you’re soon brought back to reality with your day-to-day needs demanding as much attention as your hairy brethren. Taking on part-time jobs is essential to pay for rent, food and cages, but unfortunately prevents you from progressing your investigations of the very time-specific stories. Earning money is also needed to maintain your health, energy and hunger gauges, but it isn’t immediately obvious which diet is the most effective, leading to inefficient purchases with your meagre wages. Letting your hunger or health drop to 0, failing to pay the rent or for the 5 new cages will all result in ‘Game Over’ screens, which you’ll likely see more than a few times. It’s a frantic playthrough where even one untimely purchase can result in failure.

This skewed balance seems to be intentional, however, due to the game’s short length of around 4 hours. Playing time is extended by learning from your mistakes, but also by restricting your ability to solve all the stories in one playthrough as learning about the monkeys becomes a lower priority than simply surviving to the end. Thankfully, there’s also an easy mode that removes a lot of the resource management-produced stress, allowing the player to take the varied selection of the 20 interactive stories at a more relaxed pace. And although the game’s achievements cannot be achieved in easy mode, the developer at least acknowledges that accessibility improves a product rather than diminishes it, and is an inclusion that I’m always a huge proponent of.

The plot is barely expanded upon beyond the first few screens, existing solely as a blueprint to provide the game with its absurd context, so when your run as the ‘leader of the monkeys’ ends, it’s surprisingly abrupt. It also prevents you from continuing with the stories you were progressing with, forcing you to start a new game to attempt to see them through.

With re-releases, remakes and sequels buzzwords of the gaming industry these days, innovative video games such as ‘Do Not Feed The Monkeys’ only come around once in a blue moon, and therefore they should not only be commended but encouraged – especially as this one’s from an indie developer. So, while there are some issues preventing this from being executed perfectly, it’s still as fun as a barrel of monkeys.