Say you've been on a healthy diet of lean meats and leafy greens, with low GI and high fibre, full of HDL cholesterol and devoid of MSG. Enter the new Triple Quarter Pounder Meal at Maccas. Despite the screams of protest from every healthy pore on your luminous skin, you relent. After the first tentative bite of this fistful of saturated fat, you realise it's exactly what you wanted. The still rational part of you tells you there's nothing here of nutritional value, but your quarter pounder is already down to an eighth by now, and you're wedging lukewarm fries in your mouth while trying to pass the half-chewed burger through your grease-parched gullet. Now imagine it's a copy of Ninja Blade between those sesame buns.

Delicious yet bloated metaphor notwithstanding, that summed up my experience with Ninja Blade, the latest From Software offering. Despite sharing superficial similarities with their previous Otogi games, Ninja Blade cribs from the revered God of War series more than anything. As an action brawler, the game takes you on a linear, story-driven run through the ruins of Tokyo, emphasising cinematic boss battles over the usual deluge of repetitive enemy encounters. Quick Time Events (QTEs) are the bread and butter here, allowing the developer to throw one outrageous action sequence after another at you in breathless succession. It hardly pushes the envelope and isn't executed particularly well, but its unabashed indulgence in wanton destruction, like the high fat-content in a quarter pounder, makes it a hard meal to refuse.

The time is the near future, so close it can pass for the present. The setting is Tokyo city, a veritable hotbed for iconic monster invasions. The latest offender is the Alpha Worm, a virus that infects its hosts, turning them into super-powered monsters. To contain matters, Tokyo calls on a clan of ninjas, which your character is a part of, to rid the city of the infection/invasion. For a story that is, first and foremost, here to provide context for action-packed missions in Ninja Blade, it's actually a surprisingly coherent and engaging tale (once you get past the absurdities of a sentient virus with supernatural abilities bent on world domination). As your clan succumbs to the infection they've been sent to combat, matters deteriorate fast. People are betrayed, enlightenment reached, and many a giant tentacles severed – all in a day's work for a ninja. It's pulpy and derivative, but also befitting a big, loud action game.

A big, loud action game is exactly what it is, as Ninja Blade is all about spectacle. Any hope for a shadowy ninja clan that operates with subtlety and stealth is thrown out the airlock as soon as your first mission begins with your character diving off of a military transport plane, parachute free, into a dilapidated Tokyo. From there on, you will fight giant worms that dwarf even the tallest skyscrapers, ride on the wings of planes (while battling giant worms), and generally engage in some of the most outrageous antics ever committed to digital versatile disc. In order to let the player participate in as much of this insane action as possible, the game is made up of an amalgam of several different game mechanics to suit the action, from the usual run through a stage dispatching enemies, to on-rails shooting sections, and the surprisingly predominant QTEs.

While the likes of God of War uses QTEs sparingly to highlight some of the cinematic action that would've been difficult to capture in normal gameplay, Ninja Blade embraces it. Each of the nine stages in the game feature at least two extended QTE sequences with your character performing all sorts of superhuman feats to thwart usually gargantuan foes. These exhilarating QTEs are lengthy but not very difficult, and most of them can probably be completed first try. Even if you do fail, the game simply rewinds the action to a few seconds earlier and lets you try again. You'll never be faced with having to retry entire QTE sequences over and over.

At times it does feel like the developers are taking the easy way out by not figuring out how to allow you to perform some of these awesome attacks more organically in the game, but as I said, this isn't a game that even goes near an envelope, and given the scope of the crazy action, it's understandable. As a nice touch, the game does try to provide some context for the QTEs by assigning onscreen actions to buttons you associate with particular actions. For example, X and Y are the attack buttons in the game, and therefore when you're called to press them in a QTE, it usually results in you stabbing parts of your enemy. It isn't always the case, but having some semblance of consistency helps a lot in engaging me in the action.

When you're not taking care of bosses with QTEs, the game plays as you'd expect, from a third person perspective as you advance through the stages hacking up anything that crosses your path. There's a fairly robust combat system in place here, with a myriad of combos, three blades (light, balanced and heavy) at your disposal that can be upgraded to unlock more combos, and even three (also upgradeable) Ninjitsu powers. The swords and powers can even be employed to solve environmental puzzles throughout the levels. For example, your heavy sword can break certain walls apart to reveal secret areas, your wind ninjitsu can be used to put out fires, and your light twin-blades are attached to long chains that allow you to pull yourself across deep concrete chasms.

It's a functional system that doesn't propel Ninja Blade above its peers with similar mechanics due to a lacklustre implementation. For starters, you can get through most of the game's combat pressing random combinations of X and Y on the normal difficulty level. While your enemies may break your attack from time to time, they'll always die if you press X at them enough times. Also, while I appreciate that many of the levels are formed as a result of your previous battle with giant bosses, once you're actually made to run through them, they feel fairly drab and repetitive. The repetitiveness, however, did not foster any kind of consistency, as many of the ledges you approach will prevent you from falling off, but not all. This, coupled with a janky wallk-run/jump system, leads to many unnecessary deaths (that fortunately, leaves you back to right before you made the jump, after a short loading screen).

Ninja Blade also offers up some on-rails shooting sequences where you just fire a mounted gun at enemies from atop a tank or a helicopter, as well as boss fights that don't rely on QTEs (but usually lead up to them). During these sequences, you are left to figure out the attack patterns of a boss character so you can avoid damage and wear down their health metre gradually. Once you've reduced a boss's health metre to nothing, instead of it dying dramatically, you're usually prompted to start a QTE that finishes off your foe in a spectacular bout.

Individually, none of these components are very polished. It's when they're chained together that it becomes easy to understand the charms of Ninja. A typical level sees you air-drop into the city, but you're interrupted by a giant monster. A QTE allows you to drive it back and land safely among the debris it left behind. You progress through the environment battling small clusters of enemies and running/jumping through obstacles. The boss returns, and you engage in a short QTE to get away, but not before it unleashes a smaller boss after you. You engage in heated battle and on its defeat, board a tank to chase after the giant monster rampaging through the city in an on-rails shooting sequence. When you finally catch up and confront the boss, you defeat it and finish it off with a spectacular and too-good-to-spoil QTE that leaves you with an adrenaline rush that few other games can match.

Matching the spirit of the game, Ninja Blade's presentation holds up the best when you're on the move and doing battle. Once you stop to look around, you're likely to notice a lot of repetitive environments and visual flaws. The game's numerous in-game cinematic are impressive and always fun to watch, but again, excels due to their boisterous nature rather than sheer graphical fidelity. A fittingly orchestral soundtrack also serves to amplify the intensity of the action.

Perhaps as a further indication that while the characters in the game are all about life and death, retribution and redemption, you as the player aren't meant to take any of it seriously, you can customize your character in an assortment of colours. If you're looking to dress up your ninja with different costume pieces, you will be disappointed, as it's mostly about colouring the existing costume pieces, and adding a few extraneous elements to give it a dash of personal touch. That said, if you've always wanted a pink ninja wielding gaudy golden swords to save the world, Ninja Blade can fulfil that fantasy.