Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

After a long hiatus in the turtle oriented gaming world, Konami has returned with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a beat-‘em-up style action game based off the brand new TV series. The previous TMNT based games had a flair for being better than they were supposed to be for a TV show based game, but that trend has apparently stopped. While obvious effort was put into the game in many areas, it still falls well short of “good game” status.

The story is pretty standard for a kids show TV series, which is not to say it is bad, but it’s not deep either. The turtles’ goal is to stop the evil Shredder and his goons (the Foot Clan) from getting their hands on a super powerful sword. There are appearances by all your old favorites like April, Splinter, and the hockey stick wielding Casey Jones. The whole game plays like a series of 30 minute TV episodes thanks to the way the gameplay is divided. If the TV series is your kind of thing, this might be too, but beware, this is very much a kid’s series that the game is based on, do not expect any objectives beyond defeat of evil and retrieval of pizza.

TMNT’s strongest point is its graphics. The cell shaded style is appropriate for the subject matter and looks really good. The models of the turtles and enemies are very well done and the battle animations are spot on. Cutscenes are fully animated and could easily have been pulled directly from an episode of the new show. The in-game cutscenes are less inspired due to a shortage of emotion from the in-game models, but it is minor point and overshadowed by the great voice acting by the TV series’ actors. The game also sports effects like Blam and Thwok à la Adam West Batman, which are stylish but overused. The only problem with the graphics besides enemies blatantly spawning out of nowhere is the seemingly random slow down. The slow down did not coincide with intense graphics and I cannot explain their origin, but the game was however silky smooth otherwise, regardless of the amount of enemies.

Gameplay however, was not so smooth. You can choose from any of the four turtles, but they are basically all the same. There are four attack buttons you need to worry about, a standard attack button, and spin attack button, a throw ninja star button and a rising attack button. With that many attack buttons you would have expected a more in depth combo system… but you’d be wrong. There are only two combos you will use, one for fighting one enemy, and one for fighting multiple enemies. Rising attacks every now and then are nice for juggling, but since enemies usually stay standing until you finish your combos anyway, the rising attacks are pretty much useless except for launching pots or explosive barrels at your enemies. The throwing stars are grossly underpowered and you only have ten of them, so they end up being useless as well. As the game progresses you can gain new abilities like the jump kick or raised defense, but fighting never really gets interesting outside of boss fights.

Any given area follows the formula of beating all the enemies and then progressing to another area and repeating, with the same enemies, just maybe more this time. Multiply that formula ad nauseam and you’ve got TMNT’s core gameplay. The enemy AI is horrible; the enemies will take turns standing next to you waiting for you to kill them most of the time, and the only challenge is shear numbers. The boss fights are the only break from the monotonous gameplay you’ll get, so relish them. They can range from incredibly easy to ridiculously hard, regardless of your personal intelligence. There’s always a trick to defeating the boss, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an easy trick to perform. The unfortunate part about a boss fight is that if you lose, you have to fight your way back through all the stages again to fight him. After the aforementioned monotony of gameplay this can obviously get tedious. But, if nothing else, the bosses are quite creative.

As mentioned before, the sound benefits from the voice acting, but the rest of the effects and music are mediocre. It seems to me instead of barraging the player with visual Thwoks and Bams, the game could have just had good sound effects, but no one asked me. Jealous of the visual barrage the graphic designers gave you, the sound designers decided that EVERY combo and move would end in a saying by your respective turtle. You can only hear “Talk to the feet!” so many times before you start to root for the Foot Clan, if nothing else but for their silence.

Thankfully, you will not have to go this one alone; there is a co-operative multiplayer option for story mode. Having a friend along for the ride greatly reduces the monotony and even adds a new move! The new move, where you toss your partner at your enemies looks extremely odd, but is surprisingly effective when perfected. The second player however does not gain the new abilities like jump kick that the first player does. This isn’t that big a deal because you don’t gain very much, but it seems like an oversight that could have easily been corrected. There’s also a versus mode, but given the lack of variety in the moves, the battles are short and uneventful. There are challenge modes to add extra playing time once you’ve saved the day, but unless you really really like the new Ninja Turtles, you’re not going to play it.

It all boils down to one simple rule. If you watch the TV show and want more, rent this game. If you watched the old show or didn’t watch TMNT at all, then go find the TMNT arcade game and avoid this title all together.