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- Screenshot of Mexican Ninja, Courtesy of Madbricks

Mexican Ninja: A Charming Beat-Em-Up with Irritating Difficulty

Originally posted on Total Apex Gaming | By Liesel Booker | Last updated Oct 3, 2025 9:05 AM ET

Mexican Ninja is a new beat-em-up meant to evoke classic beat-em-ups like Streets of Rage or The Simpsons. In the dystopian city of Nuevo-Toyko, you are the Mexican Ninja, who must utilize the Way of the Donkey to fight against the ruthless Narkuza ruling class. The gameplay is simple: you’ve got hordes of enemies out to get you, and you’ve got to use your ninja skills to beat them to a pulp. The game packs a punch with its hand-drawn graphics, humor, and nonstop action, but awkward controls and high difficulty prevent it from reaching its full potential.

Mexican Ninja Delivers Furious Beat-Em-Up Action

Kids of the late eighties and early nineties will remember when beat-em-ups were all over the arcades. Games like Double Dragon, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and The Simpsons ate up quarters, but delivered so much satisfying action that you kept feeding them quarters. Developed by Madbricks, Mexican Ninja captures that one-more-try feel where you feel like a powerhouse until you die, but then you want to try again. In addition, the game is a bit of a roguelike, giving you a choice between random levels whenever you start over. You can build up skills and combos that turn you into a force of destruction on both enemies and objects.

Awkward Controls

Screenshot of Mexican Ninja, Courtesy of Madbricks

Unfortunately, the lack of key-mapping draws back on the experience. You need to use the WASD keys to move, the mouse buttons to attack, the spacebar to jump, and you tap a few other keys for special moves. As someone who prefers the arrow keys to the WASD keys, the inability to change the controls hampered my experience. I also have a laptop with a touchpad mouse that doesn’t always respond to fast clicks, so I would have preferred to assign the attacks the keyboard. Key-mapping would help to make the game more accessible, seeing as how the game requires a lot of fast reaction in order to get anywhere.

You Will Die . . . A Lot

The enemies will gang up on you, meaning that you’ll do a lot of dying. After you die, you get sent back to the training area, where you can buy skills or upgrades and practice on training dummies if you desire. After that, you get sent to the street, where you can visit shrines to either pick skills to use during your next run or collect money to use at the training area. This happens every single time you die. After a while you’ll get sick of the goddess telling you not to soil your pants when you’d rather just try the level again already.

Moreover, it can take a long time to collect enough money to buy upgrades. All of this can make for a frustrating experience. I don’t consider myself great at beat-em-ups, but I can usually at least finish a level. It took me ages just to finish the first level of the game. If the training area and street sections were made optional, that would at least help the game to flow better so that dying wouldn’t be quite so irritating.

Conclusion

With some quality-of-life improvements such as key-mapping and making the side trips after dying optional, Mexican Ninja could be something special. It’s full of charm and humor, and it still makes you want to try again after dying even with the side trips slogging the flow. If you miss beating up on enemies in the arcades, you might want to give Mexican Ninja a look. You can check out the demo on Steam and see if it gels with you.

This article first appeared on Total Apex Gaming and was syndicated with permission.

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