Players select one of their favorite characters out of the Narut

Although the game takes place on a 2D plane, players can teleport between the foreground and background at their leisure.

In Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3 Narut, players select one of their favorite characters out of the Naru Shippuden story arc and battle on a series of dual-stage arenas.

Besides basic movement, jumps and wall runs, players can perform all their attacks simply by pressing the Circle button.

Even special moves can be executed by hitting Triangle first, then Circle.

The Master Road is presented as a series of squares along which you move cute little animated Narut.

As you progress from mission to mission, you frequently unlock new characters you can use in both the Master Road and other modes.

You also unlock new ninja jutsu attacks and tactics that you can activate to enhance attributes like attack power and speed.

You're regularly given the chance to use points earned for completing missions to purchase movies, music, and character artwork as well.

If the thought of acquiring all these goodies isn't enough to motivate you, you're out of luck because the gameplay itself is wholly unrewarding.

Missions take on one of two formats.

In some, the camera is situated close to your character, and you must defeat one or two opponents just as you would in a fighting game.

In others, the camera is further away, giving the action the look of a side-scrolling platformer.

In some missions, you must defeat a certain number of enemies to advance;

other times, your goal is to reach the end within a certain time limit.

No matter what format a mission takes or what goals you're assigned,

the shallow action and poor controls ensure that they're all equally uninvolving.

Button mashing is the order of the day in the fights here.

That's not to say that you don't have a decent variety of moves available,

though neither the flimsy manual nor Shippuden Ultimate Ninja Heroes itself make any effort to familiarize you with your attacks.

(Your best bet is the practice mode, where you can view a command list of your attacks and test them out on dummy opponents.)

But this hardly matters because you can just mindlessly unleash strings of attacks until your opponents go down.

Download and play Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3 Narut now.