The Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors Review (justice fist)
Fantastic game, one of the best of its genre. Played the hell outta switch version (and the SNES original) and will play it a bunch on PC/steam deck as well.
It has a very unique gameplay style that you won't find in other games of its type - it's a single plane beat em up that borrows blocking & the low/mid/overhead/throw attack type distinctions from fighting games.
The single plane nature of the game does not feel limiting like it does in other similar beat em ups, because most characters have good block-jumps with invincibility frames. They really open up the positioning possibilities, letting you do stuff like jumping into a crowd of goons and then going for a nice juicy throw, getting jumping over enemies as they're attacking and punishing them from behind, etc.
Like most other games in the genre, the game is very crowd-control heavy. You wanna aggressively corner enemies before they overwhelm you. Enemies can be quite nasty if you let them do their thing - they'll mix up different attack types, duck under your attacks, jump over you, play little footsies games with you and cover each others' weaknesses pretty effectively. The enemies are varied and synergize well. Situations can snowball out of control very quickly, and the game has a nice sense of momentum to its combat - things can go from perfect to extremely bad in seconds.
The attacks and throws feel great in this game - characters have a variety of throws with different uses all of which will come in handy. Throws and a lot of attacks (mainly special attacks & the last hit of your autocombo) have very generous invincibility frames so you'll be heavily rewarded for taking constant risks. Everything you do has very big meaty hitboxes, it just feels great.
There's also a meter management element where you can either save it up for a big screen nuke-type ability, or use it for more situational highly damaging attacks. The meter increases passively, but drops if you get hit, which makes for a lot of fun in-the-moment decision making. There's also a fairly simple but fun & easy to get into air combo system.
The game's 5 characters feel very different to play - Kunoichi has amazing mobility, Yaksha's got some really good air combos and stretchy arms, Ninja is all about sliding around the place, swinging MASSIVE nunchucks and throwing dudes/doing back breakers, Raiden is bigger than all of the game's bosses, requires a special input to turn around and lets you recreate the ED-209 scene from Robocop.
The only issue the game has to me is its length - the game begs to be cleared without deaths but is a bit too long IMO, being almost a full hour per run. There is a stage time attack mode though for shorter bursts of gameplay.
Also this should be obvious but it looks and sounds amazing, Natsume nailed it.