TMNT

It’s fair to say, we didn’t hold out much hope for this game. And it’s perhaps a tad unfair to have a preconception of a title before it’s even been placed into the console. It’s just that film tie-ins have traditionally been rather poor: either rushed, bearing little relevance to the film or a blatant attempt to cash in on a licence.

But as for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, well, perhaps our rash judgements were wrong. That is to say, TMNT is not a bad game, far from it. It’s just not a very good one.

These crime-fighting mutated pets that were so popular in the late 1980s star in a solid platformer where the main aim is to hop linear-fashion from one platform to another to reach the end of a level. The fighting elements which come in later are more of a sideshow and in that sense, it’s akin to Ubisoft’s recent Prince Of Persia titles with one major difference: TMNT is ludicrously easy. We would bet a four-year-old would have little difficulty completing each level, yet the game has an age rating of 12+. You may’ve thought Ubisoft would have cranked up the difficulty level a notch, but it hasn’t and the game is poorer for it.

So what’s it about? Well, the four turtles have gone their separate ways. Leonardo has been sent to South America to complete his training by his surrogate rat father, Splinter, Raphael is a dark vigilante called Nightwatcher and Donatello and Michelangelo have set up Cowabunga Carl’s, a business which arranges parties for children. They reunite, however, to fight evil following the appearance of some monsters and the fate of the family is, according to the blurb, in your hands.

The first few levels hold you by the hand and explain the various controls of the game and the impressive moves which you can pull off. You’ll be jumping around platforms in no time and thankfully, the training is unobtrusive. A line of text indicating what you should do suffices for much of the time, helpfully explaining, for instance, that by holding A you can increase the height of your jump and that, when in mid-air, you can click A again to double jump.

For more complex moves – such as working your way up a chasm by flipping from left to right as you climb the walls – a picture is flashed up on screen to show how this manoeuvre should be performed.

Then as you progress, you begin to instinctively know what to do in each given scenario. Yet frustratingly, the camera is terrible; some of it is down to trial-and-error. It can be hard to work out how wide some gaps are for instance and sometimes using a ledge is a necessity, but the camera isn’t up to the job of showing what needs to be done – you’ll find yourself jumping too far and flying off the edge of another platform.

Still, the fun comes when you have to steer through territories strewn with objects, forcing you to link your various moves together in quick succession. It’s fun enough to provide a slight adrenaline rush and certainly looks impressive to anyone watching you play (à la POP… again).

… continued