Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3 is another installment of the Naruto PSP series, but this time the usually strong fighter takes an unusual change in style as the fighting aspect is mixed heavily with an action-platformer type of level, as well as a few other gameplay types that seem to dilute the overall package.

Unfortunately, I felt like the visual presentation of Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3 has also lessened substantially. While the fighters were never a large presence on the screen during the fights, it seems like the character models are even smaller now, especially during the side-scrolling missions. Even during the actual fighting missions, the opposing characters just felt a lot smaller than they used to. Granted, each of the fighters is still recognizable based on their clothes, but the overall visual feel is simply less impressive this time around.

The music and sound effects, while okay, aren't anything spectacular either. Most of the audio cues you will hear are various grunts and yells by the on-screen characters, but there is no voice acting in the cut scenes or anywhere else for that matter. At least the music still very much fits the Naruto feel, so that's a plus.

Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3's main story mode is called Master Road. It is in this mode that you will explore the early events of Naruto Shippuden from Naruto's return to after Naruto and his squad meet up with Sasuke again. What is interesting is how the story is divided up. Not only are the various arcs chopped up into easy-to-handle, bite-sized pieces, but not all of it focuses on Naruto. Actually, only the first five of seven storylines are from Naruto's perspective. The last two put you in control of Sasuke as he overcomes Orochimaru, forms his own squad, and heads out to finally get his vengeance.

Each story arc is divided into a series of squares laid out like a map or game board. In order to advance to the next spot, you have to complete whatever task the game throws at you on the current square. These tasks are everything from standard Ultimate Ninja-styled fights to time trials where you have to run through a side-scrolling area within a time limit (with enemies sprinkled around, of course), or similar to the time trial, levels where you need to defeat a certain number of enemies in a side-scrolling area. There are several other types of squares as well. These will do everything from give you scrolls and other abilities to be used in missions as well as movie-clip squares which advance the story of the game.

As you work your way through various missions in Master Road, you will earn XP and NP. XP is experience and you will need certain amounts of XP in order to use techniques that you can buy in the game. As for the currency of these purchases, that's what NP (Ninja Points) are for. With the NP, you can not only buy new new scrolls, but you can also purchase Tactics. Basically, these are additional conditions that can be added to a mission. Where most conditions either state the win condition of the mission or somehow make it harder for you to win, these actually help you. They come in four categories: Attack, Defense, Speed and Special. The first three are fairly self-explanatory and typically help with how much damage you can deal or take (or in the case of Speed, how fast you are). It's in the Special category that you get some interesting conditions like the ability to jump higher, or recover your chakra or health.

Outside of the Master Road, the game offers your standard fighter options. You can, of course, choose to practice with your 50 or so unlockable characters (including the odd Gakuen Naruto and Gakuen Sasuke) to get a better feel for each one's moves. There is also a Free Battle Mode that lets you jump in for a quick fight or two without worrying about getting into the story mode. Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3 also offers a wireless (via Ad-hoc connections) fighting mode that lets you try your might against a friend's character.

Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3's Master Road Mode has a fairly solid difficulty progression. Early squares feel like tutorials as you learn about the different types of missions, while harder and harder enemies with more complex fighting conditions slowly get introduced as the game progresses. A nice feature is the ability to change your handicap on a per-mission basis. Basically, the game defaults the mission to five (it's on a scale from one to ten). If you want to make the fights harder or easier, you simply have to adjust this number before the mission kicks off and you will see a noticeable difference in the enemy A.I.

I found that I really appreciated this per-level difficulty adjustment as it allowed me to easily maintain the toughness of the game, and it also helped when I encountered an enemy that is tougher than my characters can handle.

Whether you are using Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3's Battle, Free Play or Master Road modes, the controls remain pretty much the same, and while there are some slight differences between this Heroes title and the previous ones, given the shift in gameplay styles, the controls seem to fit pretty well.

You use the (Square) button to throw your long-ranged weapons (kunai and shuriken), while your characters' more impressive attacks like jutsus are activated with the (Triangle), and of course, these abilities can be made more powerful by switching into the awakened state with a tap of the (L) button. The trick to this game though is getting used to the multi-hit combos and more powerful techniques each character can pull off. These bigger attacks are typically the result of a button used in conjunction with the (Triangle).

Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Heroes 3 is an okay experience that doesn't really do anything wrong, it simply doesn't have any aspects that make it truly stand out. While I enjoyed the way the game works through the Shippuden story (or at least the first few arcs), the frequent cut-scene squares end up adding quite a bit of distraction to the actual action of the game. Quite frankly, only die-hard Ultimate Ninja fans should look into this release, and then it's probably only worth a rental or two.