Ninjas are cool. They wear black, probably listen to heavy metal and can remove one of your testicles silently before you even noticed it was gone. Shinobido: Tales of the Ninja plays like being bum raped by Mike Tyson in a luminous yellow tracksuit: it’s painful, isn’t sly in the slightest, and you really might have expected better things out of life.

Having a game about ninjas isn’t enough to make a good game; there needs to be a good mix of stealth and action, classy animations, good weapons and gadgets. Oh yeah, and the camera needs to work. For the majority of your ninja life you won’t be tracking your target’s movements from a hilltop vantage point. Nope, you’ll be struggling to shimmy between two buildings while the camera shows you a good close-up of the other wall or a box, or maybe some trees. You see so little of your character you’d think it was a side-character and you actually played the part of a Ninja wall, which admittedly would be pretty cool.

I say likely because to be honest the AI is so terrible you can cut the throat of one of their comrades ten feet in front of them and they won’t so much as bat an eyelid, as long as you’re not directly in front of them. Most sentries can be taken out with a stealth kill (press triangle when you’re close enough), but combined with AI stupidity it makes Shinobido way too easy. I played a level which required I kill everyone around. It had a covered labyrinth-style corridor complex that would have seen me running into trouble trying to navigate corners with the camera. Luckily the sentries moved one by one out of the same corridor into the open, leaving me to hide by the wall and stealth kill every one of them as they streamed out, oblivious of the bloodbath they were walking into.

Missions range from ‘kill everyone’ to ‘steal something’ but that’s about as varied as it gets. The environments are tiny, messy, blocky affairs with tiny crevices and trees that only make the camera even more impossible to work with, and you’re hemmed in by black invisible walls. Everything about the level design screams ‘unfinished’ or ‘just plain lazy’.

Shinobido: Tales of the Ninja is a game about ninjas, but is as clumsy as a three-legged donkey who’s had his water spiked. The levels are small and carelessly thought out, the camera offers a tougher challenge than the AI and the missions hardly vary. This is a game that ought to commit seppuku and die honourably.