Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Battle Nexus
- November 30, 2004 07:48 AM PST
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Twenty years after their creation in Eastman and Laird's 1984 indie-comic, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are still going strong-unlike their videogames...
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Shell-Shaded
TMNT2 lets up to four players battle together through routine stages littered with swarms of idiotic bad guys in an effort to save Master Splinter and defeat the evil Shredder and his Foot Ninjas. The turtles are all about action, and accordingly, the story (a disparate collection of adventures from the new TV series) is barely there but hardly needed. Put simply, there isn't anything here that action fans haven't seen before in better incarnations, and the addition of tons of lengthy cut scenes from the poorly animated TV series does little to remedy the dull and repetitious gameplay.
However, what the game lacks in substance it nearly makes up for in style. TMNT2 boasts some rather outstanding cel-shaded graphics that capture the cartoon style of the show and actually look better than most of the cut scenes. And with tons of great dialogue from the show's voice actors and an abundant use of the catchy theme song, TMNT2 looks and sounds every bit the great game it could have been.
Headache in a Half Shell
Monotonous and unremarkable button-mashing brawling aside, TMNT2's biggest problems come by way of the wacky camera and the targeting system (or lack thereof). In nearly every stage, the camera angle zooms out to a ridiculously wide-angle shot to display the entire environment and show all four fighting turtles, but such an extreme viewpoint makes for teensy-weensy characters and lots of squinting eyes (don't even think of playing it on anything smaller than a 20" TV). Plus, the surprisingly sluggish and non-ninja-like fighting is worsened by the straight-ahead targeting that consistently misses the surrounding enemies and leaves you open to cheap and unrelenting counterattacks.
Still, diehard fans will appreciate the high production value and the inclusion of the early 1990s Konami arcade classics. But behind the flashy extras and cool license, TMNT2 remains an utterly forgettable (albeit forgivable) example of the modern gaming mediocrity.
