Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

"A not so terrible game that bears the TMNT name"

I remember getting this game for my birthday way back in 1995. I remember breezing through the first level, defeating Rocksteady and Bebop in the process. Then I recall coming to an obstacle called The Dam level. This level was unique in every single way. One thing was you only had 2 minutes and twenty seconds to defuse eight bombs scattered throughout Hudson river. The catch was all the different obstacles that stood in your way from electric corals to killer seaweed that would kill you in one hit. This is the level where most of my frustration began. From the seemingly harmless level One to the hell that is level 2 I had a slight feeling like I was having a sort of Deja Vu of the Battletoads game for the NES. Many people consider this a bad game but I think this game deserves a chance.

Graphics: They are great considering the year this game was released in. 1989
was the year this game came out. The turtles are true to their design considering the limitations the NES processor has to deal with. Slowdown occurs if there are many enemies on screen but this happens rarely. The one thing I didn't like was the colors of certain enemies. For example from the TV show I remember the Mousers being a white color. But in the game they are purple for some unexplicable reason.

Sound: The sounds have their good sides and their bad sides. The sounds of the Turtles' weapons are true and realistic. Leonardo's Katana blade slashes the air as that would happen in real life. Donatello's Bo staff bears a sound of something durable and heavy lashing out at enemies around him. The music is OK but it gets slightly repetitive. Another thing that bothers me is the that the TMNT theme song from the show is nowhere to be heard in this game.

Gameplay: The gameplay is fairly straightforward. You pick one of the four turtles and fight the various enemies that appear before you. The problem is that only two of the four turtles will be of actually any use to you. Leonardo and Donatello. Leonardo because his Katana blades are fast, have good range and do reasonably good damage and Donatello because his Bo has the best range and he does the most damage. There are six levels, each of them becoming harder than the previous one. There are various things that will help you throughout the game most of them being projectile weapons such as Ninja throwing stars and boomerangs. There are two segments of gameplay. One is where you have a birds-eye view in which you can enter various buildings, manholes and other similar places. The other segment is where you have a side view and where much of the action happens.

Replay Value: There actually isn't much to do after you beat this game once so I guess this game does not excel in that field. One more thing for me to say is that there is no two player mode and that means replay value is fairly limited.

Conclusion: After analyzing various fields of this game I must say that many people gave this game bad scores due do its hard difficulty setting. If the developers had made this game slightly easier and made it more orientated towards its directed audience, which are little kids, it would have been a much better game.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 01/30/07