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PS2 | Action | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Boxart for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 54 screen shots
  • GRAPHICS: 4.5
  • SOUND: 4.0
  • CONTROL: 4.0
  • FUN FACTOR 4.0
  • AVG USER SCORE 3.0
  • AVG CRITIC SCORE 2.8

Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Review by THED-PADDESTROYER | 10/22/2003 | 12:20:05 PM PST

Leonardo leads; Donatello does machines. Raphael is cool but crude; Michelangelo is a party dude.

It was a long time ago when the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, based on the insanely awesome comic by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, hit the airwaves. Now the forces of retro desperation are returning the green machines to the screen as well as every single gaming platform known to man.

Ninjas Are Reptiles
The story of TMNT is simple: Four wee turtles came into contact with some radioactive goop and were transformed into wee ninja turtles. After years of tutelage in the sewers by a rat-man ninja master, these ninja turtles turned into teenagers. That?s about all you need to know.

This game is as retro as its subject matter, and it contains all the good and bad things associated with the Jurassic ?go-right-beat-em-up? genre that made up about 97 percent of the game libraries for the 16-bit systems in the 1990s. A limited number of continues, improbable power-ups (?Ooh, someone left a floating pizza in that crate!?), and armies of identical bad guys will remind you of the days in which consoles had only enough memory to handle 10 enemies and just enough processing power to grant you a whopping six moves.

Cold-Blooded Killas
For all its throwback feel, Turtles has a lot of late-model shinyness and snappy presentation. The whole game (except a few cel-animated cinemas) is done in a nice cel-shaded look that, along with the pop-up visual sound effects (CRASH!, BASH!, etc.), gives the game a personality that takes it past similar beat-em-ups like Vivendi?s Hulk. The well-acted voice samples are way too repetitious, though, and because you fight the same enemies throughout most of the game, the combat noises get annoyingly familiar as well.

Hey, it?s a beat-em-up, what do you want? How about some combat variety? While the fighting is fun for the most part, the Turtles? limited moves make it seem like they just signed up for self-defense courses at the Y. Given the short moves list, though, the fighting action manages to be damn cool with ninjas flying and Turtles dashing about like, well, teenage ninjas.

Oh, and Konami, there are four Ninja Turtles (the theme song even counts them off). Why not give the world a four-player simultaneous Turtles game? Two-player mode is fun, but it?s just not enough.

Extra Cheese, Please
For old-school beat-em-up fans, Turtles likely will be a guilty pleasure. It?s long, difficult, and a treat to the eyes and the nostalgic heart. It?s just that humans have evolved a bit since this type of game ruled the world.

Also on the Xbox, GameCube, and PC