Ninja Reflex aims to improve your reaction time to ninja-like levels. It sounds simple enough, right? Well, it is a simple premise, but there’s some pretty smart gameplay behind this simplistic idea. And if you think this game is only going to test your ability to hit buttons quickly, then you are quite mistaken.

The game uses party-style mini-games to test and strengthen your reflexes in several ways. And the good news is that these mini-games are actually quite fun, and don’t suffer from the repetitiousness that many other games in the emergent “self-improvement” genre suffer from.

Ninja Reflex starts off by having you select a ninja-style name, which essentially consists of an adjective and a noun. You have a whole bunch to choose from, and some of the combinations end up being pretty funny. I ended up choosing Lucky Wind at the beginning and then changing my name to Giggling Bamboo and Orange Apple as the game progressed. And if you’ve got a real flair for ninja names, the good news is that you can unlock more ninja names as you progress in the game, and the final result is over 25,000 possible ninja names!

After you have picked your super-cool ninja name, you begin the game as a white belt ninja. The goal of the game is to progress all the way to a third degree black belt. You do this by completing a certain number of mini-games at your current belt level and then taking a belt test to unlock the next belt difficulty level. As you get higher belt levels, the mini-games you have already played become harder, and you also unlock new minigames.