What could be better than a game with a ninja who has to sneak in to an enemy base? I’d say nothing could beat this, if the maker of the game is skilled enough. Saboteur95 is a very enjoyable arcade jumper. The game is nice and retro, but this might not be to everyone’s liking.

The game play is nice and simple.  You are a ninja and you can complete a primary objective, a secondary objective and then escape. But as I said, you CAN. The missions aren’t necessary, you can just escape. This won’t be an easy task because the base is protected by bad guys, traps and locked doors. To harden your journey even more, you have a limited amount of “credits”.  If you die too many times, tough-luck, your mission ends there.

The area is absolutely huge. There are 400 rooms to explore. This can be either fun or infuriating. Since the game play is classic “move to next room, clear it, move on” type, the game can get boring. The hugeness of the area is also annoying, because there is no feature to save passwords.  If you don’t write them down, then you will need to remember them throughout your whole adventure. And what’s even worse is that you don’t even have a map of the base. So it’s easy to get lost. If you really need a map, you can download one on the official site though.

The graphics are borrowed from various old video games.  If you’ve played them all, then the graphics will be nothing new. Even the main character(whose appereance you can modify) is borrowed from old Mortal Kombat games. The backgrounds are nice and detailed, and have nice variety.  What really gnaws on the mood is that they aren’t animated.  You will see flames that stay like that, and sometimes you don’t even notice that it’s a flame. I did not hear any music in-game, and the sounds consisted of: “Yeah”, “Shoot him” and “Unf”. The sound really could have added to the atmosphere of the game.

If we forget a few minor bugs (and I really mean minor), then this game is a nice, solid arcade adventure game with a nice variety of enemies and backgrounds. I enjoyed the game, and the highscore system is nice and smart. I recommend this to all ninja fans and fans of the old Dizzy games. People who hate big areas to explore will want to steer clear of this game.