The latest title in the Uzumaki Chronicles vein of the Naruto series, Uzumaki Chronicles 2, adds a few new changes but proves to be a familiar lesson in tedium and repetition.

The storyline for this beat 'em up adventure sees Naruto and friends having to deal with the Shirogane clan, ninjas who are using their mastery of puppetry to seek out five Spirit Orbs that will bring their master out of an ethereal prison. To do this they have created an army of automatons that are attempting to conquer the land and find these mystical orbs.

You would think that battling thousands of what are essentially robots is a tried-and-true form of beat 'em up entertainment, but this game makes it tedious and repetitive, despite the new elements.

The adventure begins in the familiar setting of Naruto's Hidden Leaf Village where you get all your mission objectives. From there you follow paths on a map leading to other locales and villages, intermittently interrupted by random bandit and Shirogane clan members. Plunged into an open-ended but small level, you must defeat all the bad guys and exit, continuing on your journey on the world map. Once you reach your destination, you'll fight some more bad guys and encounter some light puzzle solving, but there's nothing particularly exciting going on, even when the cinematics kick in and torture you with dialogue that is as tired as the actors delivering sound - luckily you can skip most of it if you want. Even the boss fights aren't all that challenging, but they do at least break up the monotony for a short bit of time.

One of the major flaws of this game is that Naruto and his pals are all way too over powered, which means that you will never have to use anything beyond the powers you start with at the beginning of the game. Naruto can target enemies; perform different jumps and dashes; use a variety of combos to juggle opponents and more. There's even an ability to generate a quartet of clones that can help take down an enemy or locate secrets or points of interest.

As Naruto uses his overpowered ninjitsu skills on enemies, the drop tons of virtue orbs, which are used to boost character attributes. They also drop money, which is used to buy health, chakra items, and items that can be placed on the skill plate. The skills plate is new to the series and gives your character new abilities, and bonuses based on how you place items on the plate. This is still a good feature and it serves a purpose but as I've already said Naruto is way overpowered to begin with.

You can switch to other characters available at any time but chances are you'll simply stay with the boy in the orange jumpsuit because there's no real incentive to do otherwise. One thing that does save you from going to the very brink of insanity is two play cooperative play. Perhaps I'm just a sucker for any game that lets you bring a friend along, but at least you can create your own fun moments or suffer in tandem with a buddy - either way it helps a little bit.