Publisher: Gamecock Media Group
Developer: Blazing Lizard
System: XBLA
Genre: Sports
Release date: Available now
Review by: Ed Humphries

There’s a great line in Robert Altman’s 1992 Hollywood satire, “The Player.” A desperate screenwriter pitches potential projects as mash-ups of established properties, describing them as “It’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s meets Psycho,” each more ludicrous than the last. The idea is that audiences crave the familiar, rejecting anything new and innovative. The game industry isn’t immune to this Reese’s school of thought – take two great things and make one great taste – with sequel after sequel cannibalizing the innovations that have come before to seemingly build a better game (when Sonic is employing Bullet Time, you know we’ve got problems.) It’s a notion that developer Blazing Lizard has embraced heartily, melding pirate chic with ninja cool in its recent XBLA release, Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball. Based on my time with the title, I can safely say that no one’s got their chocolate in my peanut butter.

Everything you need to know about this game is right there in the title. It’s dodgeball featuring assorted pirates and ninjas. There are also unlockable robot and zombie squads, but androids and the undead are so 2007, so the scallywags and stealth assassins grab top billing. You choose a squad and then simply mash buttons to lob a ball at the opposing team. Unlike real-life dodgeball, one hit does not knock the other player out. Instead, the game utilizes a health bar for each character, essentially turning the game into a simplistic rendition of a melee combat game, along the lines of the Smash Brothers titles.

In single player, the gamer chooses a team and proceeds through Story Mode, which is essentially a series of loosely tethered matches spread throughout four unique environments. In between contests, an asinine tale of why the Pirate Captain doesn’t want his daughter dating a ninja unspools. The beginning Easy Tier features a 2-on-2 faceoff. After you complete the initial four arenas with your dynamic duo, you move up to the Medium Tier, which opens up the squads to three on each side. You then progress through the same set of four small levels, with things growing more chaotic with the extra players on the court. But the speed of the game decreases because of the additional calculations required to be done by an advanced, next-generation machine to keep up with six tiny sprites as they duck and dodge across a static backdrop. When you graduate to Hard, which offers four-on-four melee, whip out the glow sticks and pacifiers; you’re in for a strobe show.

The controls are fairly simple to grasp, with very few moves mapped to the controller, but the corresponding actions feel slippery. I never felt like I had full, tactile control of my tiny avatars, which proved troublesome in a game in which the only strategy employed beyond mindless button mashing is the ability to time a button press to deflect or catch an oncoming attack. Too often, the action wouldn’t register and my character would get knocked down by a power shot, leaving me vulnerable to another salvo from the unflinching AI.

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