NARUTO TO BORUTO: SHINOBI STRIKER

Critic score and game lifespan fully split here — a 64 at launch became a six-year marathon

The fascinating thing about Shinobi Striker is the crack running through it between score and survival. At its 2018 launch the critic average sat at 64 — OpenCritic filed it under "Weak," 53 outlets recommended it just 9.6% of the time, bottom 25%. By that line it should have gone cold early. It didn't: six years on it's shipping a tenth season, sitting at 84% positive across more than forty thousand Steam reviews, with a player peak still reaching the low thousands in 2024.

That crack isn't a contradiction; it just means the press and the players measured with two different rulers. The press measured launch completeness and content volume — and on both, Shinobi Striker flunks. The players' ballot runs on another set of metrics: is the core loop durable, is the community alive, does the operation keep going — and on all three it stands. An honest review has to hold both faces at once: this isn't a one-and-done single-player game, it's an online competitive ecosystem that survived on six years of updates.

Who should buy, who should walk — first ask whether you have a squad and can stomach the thinness

Down to the practical question: should you buy it? If you're a Naruto fan with a fixed set of friends to play with, willing to get on a mic, and you love the feel of running up walls and across rooftops in a teamfight while slowly grinding out a jutsu combo all your own — then it was made for you. This is its home turf and you'll have a great time.

But if what you want is a complete single-player Naruto story, or you're used to mindless solo-queue fun and can't tolerate thin content and a daily-login operating shell — you'll probably be let down, and you should walk. A lot of the negativity really traces to a mismatch of expectations: people arrived carrying a Storm-style appetite for single-player narrative and found a game with no intention of telling them one. See it as the team-based online competitive game it is first, then decide whether to step in.

The smartest way in, and why nothing in the Naruto lineup quite replaces it

Last, on version and placement. The list price skews high — it launched in the $60 bracket — but it's discounted year-round, having gone as low as 75% off historically. For a newcomer the smartest entry is to pick it up when the price is right and stack it with the recent seasonal content that's already been made free — you get most of six years of accumulation for very little, sidestepping the double resentment launch buyers swallowed of thin content plus paid seasons. As for where it sits among Naruto games: its irreplaceable hook is welding the wire kunai's three-dimensional team scrum to a freely unlockable, mix-and-match jutsu pool — that brand of vertical team combat is one of a kind in the Naruto catalog. Its most direct rival is Bandai's own Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, which runs thicker content and a more durable solo mode but keeps its combat on a flat plane. Shinobi Striker bet on design instead, building the fight vertical and purely team-based — bolder, newer. Two different trades: want content depth, go to Xenoverse; want this specific three-dimensional scrum, Shinobi Striker is still the only one handing it out.

In the end this is a game of unusually sharp edges — its strengths and its flaws are both loud, and neither one hides the other. The wall-running, jutsu-stacking combat is genuinely special; the launch content, the solo grind and the operating shell are genuinely rough. What it asks of you isn't patience with mediocrity but clarity about appetite: decide which half of that ledger you actually came for, and you'll never feel misled. Come for the fight with a regular squad and a mic, and even six years on it still delivers something that nothing else on the market does.