Everyone loves ninjas. Those loveable, sneaky warriors of stealth have a long and illustrious entry in the lexicon of gaming. The good thing about this is that you sort of know what to expect with them (leaping over rooftops, hiding in corners) and this new PSP slice of feudal Japan is happy to stick with the clichés and give ninja fans exactly what they want.

Shinobido: Tales of the Ninja fits easily into the stealth action genre: you navigate your sneaky character around a series of environments carrying out missions to assassinate, kidnap, or massacre your enemies. Generally the most effective way of doing this is to avoid direct confrontations, so approaching enemies from behind for a quick one-hit kill – or even just avoiding them – is the order of the day.

Fans of ninja lore will be pleased by the broad selection of oriental gadgets on offer, including standard-issue stuff (grappling hook, shuriken, smoke bombs, etc.) and the not-so-standard (exploding sushi). The missions themselves are all fairly short, which works well to the strengths of the PSP and means you shouldn’t have any problems getting a quick game in during the morning commute.

So far, so good, but while there’s plenty to like about Shinobido, there’s also plenty that’s wrong with it. Firstly, the graphics are nowhere near as good as we’ve come to expect from a PSP game, with unrealistic characters and a serious lack of visual detail across the board. While this isn’t a huge problem in itself, when compared with some the gorgeous PSP visuals we’ve seen released recently (Daxter, Syphon Filter), it’s slightly disappointing. Secondly, the camera is unresponsive in the extreme, even for a PSP game. Because of this, you’ll often find yourself impaled on the end of an enemy sword before you even know it’s there, which is far from ideal.

In the game’s defence, the bite-sized gameplay means that you’ll never have to re-play anything for more than 5 minutes, so even if you fall foul of the abysmal camera angles all you have to do is re-start. While this reduces the frustration rating, it’s more of a necessity than a bonus, and doesn’t excuse the game’s other problems.

In spite of these fairly significant defects, Shinobido still manages to be reasonably entertaining. Admittedly, this is mostly because the presentation and short missions draw your attention away from some of its faults, but there’s still enough to enjoy for hardcore fans of the stealth genre. Seriously flawed, but ok if you like this sort of thing.

Shinobido: Tales of the Ninja is out now for PSP