How can anyone resist a game title like "Ninja Dragon Rider"? In essence,  this is a side-scrolling shoot 'em up, perhaps even echoing the classic 1980's Defender, albeit with dragons and mosters. A nice attempt by the developer, but somewhat thwarted by performance quirks and by being slightly too.... easy. Still, it's free, available for just about any Symbian phone of recent vintages (including S60 3rd Edition) and clearly something of a labour of love by its creator, so worth a blast!

Here's Ninja Dragon Rider in action on the Nokia N8:

A stylish splash screen, with social links...

Only three levels/worlds are included, but they're quite long - I played for ten minutes or so and didn't get to the end of level 1.

Two monster types to shoot down, one rocket(!), plus three bonuses and power ups.... Note the legacy left/right/up/down key notes - these are to allow gameplay on older keypad driven phones like the Nokia N96....

With touchscreen phones, you drag your dragon around as needed and, rather cleverly....

... the very dragging process also causes your dragon to fire. In practice, this means you've almost got an auto-fire arrangement going on.

There's plenty of blasting fun here, though I do think the game is currently too easy. Even though monsters can sneak up from the left and arrive in greater numbers, it's still too easy to shoot them down and too easy to evade them. More playtesting needed!

I also noticed that the scrolling animation slowed down and got a little jerky when the game played sound effects - playing with sounds 'off' cures the jerkiness, though you do then lose some of the atmosphere. Your call. And hopefully the developer can optimise things further...

You can download "Ninja Dragon Rider" for free from the Nokia Store here.