Nickelodeon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Genre: Arcade Brawler

Players: 1-4 Co-Op (Local Wireless)

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: Activision Blizzard

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Nickelodeon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Master Splinter’s Training Pack, along with Nickelodeon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Danger of the Ooze)

So to make things clear, I have to distinguish this game as Nickelodeon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because a game by the same title exists based on the live-action Michael Bay film. On the other hand, this game, released on the Nintendo 3DS in 2013, is naturally based on the Nickelodeon computer-animated version of the classic comic book characters, and is an Arcade Brawler much like the classic games of the 8-bit and 16-bit era, though it plays quite differently.

In order to highlight the computer-animated art style of the show’s characters, this game makes use of 3D visuals for its characters and locales, and while these look pretty nice on a technical level, the effect on the gameplay is terrible, because everything in the game is so very dark that it becomes difficult to parse the action. That action, unfortunately, is backed by completely forgettable music, and some pretty unimpressive sound effects that do little to sell the power of the attacks being traded by characters. At the very least, this game does feature voiced characters with the same voices as the show, but the writing isn’t really compelling enough to make you care. Oh, there is one other odd thing – the opening cinematic of the game is far too quiet for some reason. Not sure what that’s about.

Well, okay, but how is the gameplay? That’s the important part of a Brawler, right?

Sadly, the gameplay here is just awful. The four Turtles seem largely interchangeable. You can upgrade all four of these characters independently, but even so I can’t find a reason to want to play any of them over the others apart from pure personal preference for the character. You can swap back and forth between them on the fly with the tap of a button or the touchscreen, but there’s just not much reason to do so apart from times one of their health bars starts to get low. Frustratingly, when you’re not playing a character, half the time they’ll just stand around not doing anything, even if enemies are lining up to attack them. Enemies sometimes stand around stupidly too – the AI in this game is absolutely atrtocious.

However, as bad as all that is, the hit detection in this game is even worse, with attacks that should connect whiffing as often as not. This is on top of the fact that downed enemies are invincible and untouchable unless they’ve become damaged enough to throw, and take a good long while to get up again so you can get on with fighting them.

In short, Nickelodeon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is an Arcade Brawler that does just about everything wrong. The characters are indistinguishable, the AI is horrendously bad, the hit detection is abysmal, and the visuals are so dark that you’ll have trouble seeing what’s going on. If you’re looking for a fun Ninja Turtles game to play on a handheld, this is not the game you’re looking for. Not even close.

tl;dr – Nickelodeon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is an Arcade Brawler that’s terrible in just about every way, with too-dark graphics, characters that aren’t really distinguishable from one another, terrible enemy AI and even worse hit detection. This is about as far as you can get from the classic Ninja Turtles games of yesteryear. Avoid it.

Grade: D-

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