Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound review – tight platforming and snappy combat makes this one of 2025's best

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is the kind of modern successor to a cult classic series designed to welcome new and existing fans alike, mixing tight action-platforming with satisfying combat and boss battles.

Typical. You spend years waiting for a modern throwback to one old-school ninja-starring 2D action platformer, only for two to arrive at once. But whereas Sega's forthcoming Shinobi: Art of Vengeance opts for a modern hand-drawn art style, Ninja Garden: Ragebound firmly keeps its foot in the retro realm using a beautiful, pixelated aesthetic. The kind of which developer The Game Kitchen is known for and swiftly became a master of.

Such an art style is key to much of the charm found in this sequel to Tecmo’s classic NES series, which, when combined with tight platforming and rewarding combat abilities, easily makes this one of the standout titles of its kind. Regardless of whether this is your first or thirteenth Ninja Gaiden, Ragebound is sure to hook you with the full force of a katana slice.

Getting the obvious part out of the way, Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound simply looks gorgeous. As a big fan of The Game Kitchen’s two previous Blasphemous games, it’s clear that the Spanish studio has spent just as much time, care, and attention finessing this world of ninjas, demons, and underground gangsters as it previously did 18th-century Spain.

It’s often hard to stand out these days in the indie scene due to the avalanche of titles utilising a pixelated art style to try and recapture a sense of nostalgia. Despite this, Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is both beautiful and richly detailed in all the variety-filled locations you fight through. From helicopter carriers to pirate coves, there sure are a lot of them.

This same attention to detail is applied to the gameplay itself, which I have no trouble describing as tight, responsive, and rewarding. As a result, role-playing as an ambitious ninja apprentice always proves to be incredibly easy, as often while playing, I felt I was moving through stages like butter.

Bouncing on the head of an enemy using Ragebound’s patented Guillotine Boost jump, slicing through another one in mid-air, and then landing into a roll to lunge into another... Chaining kills as up-and-coming ninja master Kenji Mozu often has a great sense of flow to it, provided you read enemy attacks far enough in advance and know what you’re doing.

While certainly not devoid of Ninja Gaiden’s trademark difficulty – just wait until you run into the game’s final string of bosses – Ragebound definitely takes a softer approach when it comes to onboarding. This helps not only if you’ve never played an old-school Ninja Gaiden game before, but also to learn all the gratifying mechanical quirks unique to Ragebound.

The biggest is undoubtedly called Hypercharge, where, rather than simply wailing on enemies repeatedly, certain foes will be coded blue or red. Attack those in blue with a sword attack or those in red with a special, ‘Spider’ attack, and your next hit is guaranteed to kill in just one hit.

The Hypercharge system takes a little while to get used to since it can substantially change the rhythm of combat. Grow accustomed to dishing out red- and blue-coded attacks as necessary, though, and you can save yourself a lot of time and effort. In fact, some of the most frustrating moments I experienced were those when I accidentally unleashed a Hypercharge attack on an underling as opposed to a hulking, shielded enemy.

Someone who could have been defeated with one swipe suddenly demands several, severely slowing down my pace and making my actions feel less ninja-like. Hypercharge is flexible in that it can technically be totally ignored, but you’d be doing yourself a disservice.

This strategic throughline bleeds into Ragebound’s simple but effective upgrade system, too. Essentially, Kenji has two talisman slots that can be equipped with different types of perks or penalties in between stages, all of which contribute greatly to how tough a time you’ll have fighting through stages.

Although a specific hard mode is unlocked after finishing the campaign, choosing the talisman that, say, warps you right back to the level’s start instead of the last checkpoint, makes for a great way to tweak Ragebound to suit your preferred level of challenge. I personally could never take off the talismans that restored Kenji’s health when passing a checkpoint or healed him when achieving a three-kill combo. However, there’s sure to be a talisman combo ideal for your playstyle.

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Air your rage

A pixelated 2D action-platformer isn’t traditionally the type of game where I worry about the narrative. And yet, Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound surprisingly does enough legwork in the narrative and characterisation department that I couldn’t help but care about the plight of our two main protagonists. You see, roughly as third of the way into the game a new playable protagonist, Kumori, is introduced, focused on ranged play and a tougher degree of platforming.

Demons threatening to take over the Earth is enough to force them to work together, and it allows for the Kumori sections to break up the regular bout of firing off Guillotine Boost jumps, Hypercharge attacks, and Spider abilities rather nicely. If anything, I would have liked Kumori to stand on her own a bit more, but she definitely has moments to shine as the story progresses.

Another slight nit I have with this otherwise tightly produced and carefully balanced package are the Secret Art abilities you can equip Kenji with. They work similarly to Talismans in that they can be swapped in and swapped out before selecting a level, but my issue is that I never really felt the need to try any others aside from those I started with.

The screen-tearing Ragebound art attack proved too useful when entering the later phases of a boss battle, while the Kama curved blade always came in handy to target hard-to-reach enemies behind walls or out of range. Still, Ragebound rewards players willing to check off every level’s three specific challenge qualifiers – beat a boss under 4 minutes, don’t fall into a pit, and so on – with a tier rating that unlocks these new abilities, doing a good job at encouraging you to play through them again after finishing the story.

While each level in Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is memorable to fight through and expertly designed for its own distinct reasons, I’d be remiss not to mention the truly exceptional boss fights on display here. Although incredibly tough at times (I don’t think I ever beat one in fewer than 10 attempts), no one is ever like the last in terms of what’s required of you to take them down.

From demons able to send lightning sparks flying all around the screen to those that force you to keep your feet off the ground for almost too much time as flames swirl, Ragebound’s boss battles had me gripping my gamepad in a way I hadn’t for years, with each truly primed to test every player’s mettle.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is one of the biggest surprises to come out in 2025 for me. Having little to no affinity for those original NES games, or even the 3D successors that followed, it still enraptured me with its thrilling, Hypercharge-powered combat system, glorious pixel art, and some of the toughest (yet fairest) platforming sections and boss battles I’ve experienced in a modern 2D side-scroller.

Against all odds, Ragebound finds a way to pay respect not just to the series but to the entire genre’s past by imbuing it with plenty of modern features. The result is a near-perfect concoction that makes roleplaying a ninja not only something to be enjoyed in the moment, but also something not afraid to test these skills by offering up a decent challenge.

Overall review score: 5/5