No turtle soup for me

March 23, 2007 by Tim

Man, what a waste of potential TMNT (the game) was.

Let me start by saying I bought the game. I’m enjoying the game, for what it is. It’s not a bad game. It’s just not the game it could have been (if, say, they were actually trying to do a new Ninja Turtles game, and not just get something out to cash in on the film).

TMNT is a platformer, broken up by a series of stages fights.

The platforming is decent. Very reminiscent of Prince of Persia (for obvious reasons). It’s a bit repetitive, and mostly simple, though there have been a few parts that gave me some trouble. I think those were mostly due to lack to properly responsive controls, though.

The fighting is, also, fairly repetitive, and not very deep at all. You’ve really only got one attack button, which you button-mash to perform pre-scripted random combos. You have a jump kick that is fairly worthless, and a block that doesn’t do anything.

To top it all off, you get absolutely assaulted with obnoxious audio clips thoughout the whole game. I’m not talking about the scripted voice-acting that tells story while you play, I mean shit like “cowabunga” or “whoa-hahoo!”, that would be neat if you heard it once or twice per level. But you hear it every 5-10 seconds. I turned voices off, because it was so incredibly annoying.

TMNT is clearly designed for younger gamers. Though if you enjoy the turtles, and you want some mindless entertainment, you could do worse.

It’s just painful to see the areas in which the game could have been seriously improved. Co-op, for instance. The entire game talks endlessly about teamwork, but then you don’t get to use any real teamwork. You can only play single-player, with one turtle at a time. I don’t care how repetetive the fighting or platforming in the game is, if it had 4-player co-op, a la the old arcade game, TMNT would automatically be about 50x better.

I’d say rent it, if you’re curious, but I can’t recommend you buy it. It gave me my turtles fix, but it has absolutely zero replay value. In the end the only challenge I could find in the game was a) seeing how fast I could complete the level and b) trying not to take any damage in the fights.

Whatever, though. TMNT was really just a distraction to tide me over until Command and Conquer 3 next week. I’m chomping at the bit for that one.


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