Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Nintendo Wii

If you are seasoned, adult gamer, forget about buying or even renting this game for yourself. If you have a 7-year old that loves the Nick cartoon and just wants to BE a ninja turtle, this game is for them… not you. A seasoned gamer will be disgusted on multiple levels by the crappy controls, clunky gameplay, and various other areas of extremely poor design, including: Clipping audio, out of sync voice overs, boring and repetitive combat, senseless storyline, and too many more shortcomings to list here. So all of this begs the question, why is it so bad? The answer is sadly obvious: Someone in charge of deciding who would get contracted to program this game went to Activision and said, “Make us this video game as cheaply as possible… in fact, just have your unpaid, part-time interns build it”. There is no way a group of seasoned game designers with conscience would have produced this awful game. I would guess that this game was actually designed to be a free online game and then some greedy suit decided they could release it on consoles and charge 30 bucks a copy without being impaled by an angry mob. So there you go. Seasoned Gamers… leave it alone, but buy it for your kid(s) and they’ll love you for it. They wont notice all the bad stuff, and they’ll get to be ninja turtles at last… til dinner time anyway.

great

OK, first off as a TMNT fan this game was worth the 30 bucks. Had it been a 50-60 dollar title then I might be a little peeved. I’m going to try to point out that although this game is far from flawless it does have some good things going on as well. The graphics and sound are pretty “meat and potatoes” stuff here, nothing real fancy and could have easily been done on the PS2 to be honest. However, the Turtles’ models represent their animated Nickelodeon counterparts very well and the animations when they run and jump are perfect to how they do it in the show. The dialogue as expected gets a little repetitious after about the first 15 minutes and even I got sick of hearing Mikey yell “I love breaking stuff!!” every single time I cracked open a inanimate object but other times I found myself chuckling at some of the old school references when the turtles would banter with other in between gameplay. The volume clipping issue during certain cut scenes is a bit unbearable and is really the worst gripe I have about this game. This is a simple issue that should have been resolved before the games release, budget title or not. The actual gameplay is surprisingly smooth as there are no freezing or bug like issues that seem to have plagued the Online TMNT game “Out Of The Shadows” released a few months ago. The turtles move fluidly and its pretty much just flailing away at one button and beating up various baddies. When an enemy gets beaten down bad enough you have the option to throw him into the screen which is a nice throwback to the Turtles In Time game of the early 90’s. All 4 turtles are there the whole time (even with 1 player) and you can change on the fly which is kind of a cool feature taken from Konami’s 2005 effort “TMNT 3: Mutant Nightmare.” The story mode campaign is nearly identical to “Mutant Nightmare” where you see a map of 15 or so levels and you can go back and play them again if you miss an object or want to increase your score to upgrade the Turtles. The more points and secret ooze canisters you collect the more attacks you can buy for each one of the turtles thus making their one button combos a little more interesting. If you can get past its overall simplicity its actually a fun game especially when the multiplayer factor is added in. At the end of the day its not the best TMNT game but its by far not the worst.