Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Prepare for ninja kick-butt fighting as you face the Shredder and his vile pack of Foot Ninjas!

NA release: 21st October 2003
EU release: 30th April 2004
JP release: N/A
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
NGC Magazine Score: 40%
Mods Used: Widescreen Hack

This is a tie-in game to the 2003 Ninja Turtles show. It’s a classic style arcade beat-’em-up from Konami – who made some great Ninja Turtle beat-’em-up arcade games – and was successful enough to get two sequels and a spin-off. It also starts out with the TV show intro and has the voice actors from it providing new lines. It all sounds rather promising.

However, it’s an empty promise. This is a classic style side scrolling beat-’em-up, but in 3D, which could work, but this is a dull as dishwater beat-’em-up. There’s a small amount of attacks and the enemies and levels are just tedious to get though. They loosely follow a few random episodes of the show, with clips of the episode at a few points, but the levels themselves don’t match up with what is happening in the story and it’s all rather jarring.

The levels are made up of bland corridors, which is a shame as the game has a fairly nice cel-shaded look to it. Every few steps a forcefield will block your progress until you dispatch all enemies then a classic “go” arrow will pop up to let you carry one. The game’s HUD highlights how bad the level design and camera is as it includes a radar to help you find enemies when they spawn (which they do by just popping into existence, even right in front of you).

To make matters worse, this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game only supports one additional player, so no four player action. And if you want to see the final boss, then player 1 will have to trudge through the entire game as each of the four turtles.