Back in the dark mists of antiquity – an odd and frightening era we will refer to as the 1980s – a black-and-white comic book about four brothers who happened to be teenagers, mutants, ninjas and turtles become an underground indie hit. Oh, but those were simple times indeed.
Now, virtually everyone in the English-speaking world is aware of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, whether through the old-school comics, the cheesy but fun live-action movies in the early ’90s (Judith Hoag as April O’Neil was the subject of many an adolescent fantasy), the crappy Saturday morning cartoons, the endless merchandising or the just-released CGI movie, simply called TMNT.
Ubisoft Montreal rarely makes a misstep – these are the people who gave us
Splinter Cell and Prince Of Persia, after all – but TMNT is definitely not their finest work. The game is a mix of platforming and combat, but the former turns out to be too inconsistent while the latter is too simple.
TMNT deserves kudos for taking the Turtles back to what they were before Saturday morning cartoons diluted them into pizza-eating airheads, making them a little edgier and grittier. (Maybe the TMNT movie does this too, but to be honest I haven’t seen it. No flesh-and-blood April? No interest.)
But this return to the Turtles’ roots can’t compensate for the mostly middling gameplay. The platforming stuff is fun, and the Turtles can pull off a variety of Prince of Persia-like acrobatics and stunts, though the levels themselves offer little in the way of freedom and there are spots where the camera angle makes it infuriatingly difficult to successfully make a jump.
The combat sequences are the game’s biggest weakness, though. Rather than being organically melded into the platforming bits, they’re basically jammed in as interludes. And the fighting is so ridiculously easy, generally involving beating down a massive wave of brainless, generic foes, there’s no real need to use any of the Turtle’s cool signature moves or to call upon your fellow amphibians for some tag-team Turtle terror.
Each console version of the game has its own minor pluses. The PS2 and GameCube versions are the cheapest, the 360 version has the best visuals (though it really doesn’t look all that next-gen) and the Wii version obviously makes use of the Wii remote for combat, though in such a dull way you might wish they’d just left it out completely.
We generally don’t have high expectations for movie-to-game tie-ins, and in that respect TMNT’s blandness isn’t a huge shock. But it would have been great to see some proper care and respect lavished on the Turtles for once. That, or an April O’Neil nude code.
Bottom line: The somewhat fun jumping and climbing segments are occasionally hampered by a bad camera, and the combat gets more and more mindlessly repetitive as the game goes on. Definitely not cowabunga-worthy.
WHAM! Rating: |
5 out of 10 |
ESRB Rating: |
E (Everyone 10+) |
Official Web Site: |
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