This review is for the PlayStation 2 version of TMNT.
Did something happen between the ‘90s and 2007 that made it impossible to make a competent brawler? I cannot fathom how a fully 3D game with Ubisoft money behind it is so much worse at portraying the basic act of hitting a guy with a weapon than actual arcade games. It’s so fucking bizarre that this game is such a comprehensive failure. This franchise has such a solid foundation of brawler gameplay that the developers could have drawn on, and the free-running gameplay should not be this inconsistent and rudimentary when it’s being made by a developer which had already put out three parkour-centric Prince of Persia titles.
This should have been an easy 5/10—the gold standard for 2000s movie tie-ins. Literally just make some okay brawler sections with some okay platforming sections and you’ve got a computer game. As it stands, the combat sucks an impressive amount of ass. Every move you can do is worse, objectively, than just using the basic attack, and one of the four turtles is much stronger than the other three. Boss fights and some obstacles in levels force you to swap between them, but other than that, there’s no reason to do that. Platforming is weird and bad. Sometimes your guy will just stop wall-running for no reason and you’ll die, and most of the obstacles are focused on wall-running, so you’ll die a lot. Nothing else to say there, really.
I’m tempted to say that if it had co-op I’d give it an extra star, but actually I don’t think that would help. A lot of bland games are elevated by co-op but this one doesn’t have enough going on; the only difference co-op would make is that it would be two guys spamming circle and then dying fourteen times on a simple jump because of bad controls.
Dylan's Morsels 