Does Rated "E" Have to be Simple and Boring?

What should have been a fun, entertaining and challenging game has turned out to be poorly developed concept trying to cash in on Ninja Turtle fame. Other than it's name this game has little to do with the concept of Ninja. There is a lot of fighting but little else.

Activities
While playing you can smash crates to find Ninja stars, food, enhancers, or nothing at all. If you find food and take it your health will recover some. If you are already at full health then taking it will not help you, and you can't save it for when your health is low. The Ninja stars will sometimes have more power than others depending on which stars you happen to get. The enhancers will cause you to have what looks like a whirl wind around you. There are speed, defense, and a few other enhancers that are supposed to help you but I really saw no effect in speed or defense or anything else so I don't think they really do anything except make the visual whirl effect.

There are drums sitting around like the crates if you hit them they will explode and take some of your health, but if you smack them just right and run they will take out some of the bad guy's. On one level they are used to defeat a junk yard robot.

You can beat on a car if you are on the street and it will catch on fire and explode. IF your enemies are near it will take them out. If you are caught in the explosion you will lose health.

Pass Words
If you do well enough Master Splinter will give you a password to change costumes or do other things with different turtles. Or you can go to the pass word entry area and start punching in different codes. There are only 125 possible combinations. We unlocked 11 Codes using the latter method and only went through about 3/4 of the combinations.

Controls
Fighting is simple and your enemies go down very easily on the earlier levels. Each of the Turtles has a few moves that they use over and over again. X and  will be used most of the time Circle is for jumping and Triangle will do a Throw the Ninjo Stars. Their moves are basically the same in each fight and requires very little skill to defeat the bad guys. Once a bad guy has been taken out he vaporizes in a puff of smoke. You cannot use your hands to lift anything, nor do any fancy kicks.

Pressing L2 will give you a short burst of speed which can help you escape an explosion or move in close for an attack before the goon knows what hit him.

Pressing R1 switches which Ninja stars you are throwing if you have more than one type.

Game Play
Select one or two player mode

If you are in a two player mode both players are on the same side. If you are fairly far apart in the arena then the view will zoom out some but you are limited as to how far apart you can be. So you want to keep an eye on your partner.

Select your turtle and advance through stages of difficulty.
You are in a limited arena that you cannot go past because of a force field and your enemies appear out thin air. Once you have defeated all the enemies then the force field will no longer be there and an arrow will appear and prompt you to move towards the next arena. Once there you cannot go back and you have to defeat all the goons before you can get through the next force field. This will continue until you get through to the Big Boss. At the end of each level you will face a Big Boss or a Machine. Beat that and you advance to the next level.

As you advance through the levels you will have to defeat more and more enemies but their skills don't improve much you just have to face more of them at once.

Some of the enemies are street thugs and others are machines, the machines range from little foot high mechanical T-Rex's to man sized robots that can throw really long punches with telescoping arms. The thugs will range from street bullies to stealth Ninjas. The stealth Ninjas. appear as bubbles in the graphics like you were looking through a glass marble.

The Boss at the end of each level will get increasingly more difficult but still fairly easy. These will either be big muscle guy's or large machines. some of the machines can shoot varying weapons at you.

Once a level has been completed your screen will go blank and you can save the game go to an earlier level or advance to the next level.

Graphics
For the most part the graphics looked three dimensional with no glitches where you are sticking through a solid object. However the movements were awkward and the way they walked didn't look natural, if you tried to go out of bounds your feet would just slip back and forth.

If you hit something it created a comic book effect with the words thwok, or bonk, or something like that in the vicinity of where you struck. The best graphic effects were the robots and the explosions looked pretty cool too.

Sound
Like the fight sequences the same thing every time you pressed the button. Some times you wanted to let the guy hit you just so you could say ugh.

My Take
I played two player mode with my son and to be sure he out fought me by a long shot. Later I watched as he played, and that experience is where most of this review came from. For the most part he seemed to enjoy it but after a while it was getting boring. I kinda got the feeling he was pretending to enjoy this game more than he actually was. The reason was because there was no new moves or challenges for someone of his gaming skills. The cost of this game is $40.00 plus and it's really over priced. Except for the graphics there is not much to keep you engaged. There are no beginner to expert selections which means that even a novice will get tired of it in a fairly short time.

On the plus side there is no blood and though you could call this a violent game it is pretty tame compared to others in the same rating. You are playing as one of the Ninja Turtles or with the right pass word you can even be Master Splinter so you are supposed to be the hero and ultimately you will save April O'Neil and the city from the bad guys. Because your enemies are not ordinary citizens but criminals or evil machines then the violent aspects of the game are somewhat justifiable.

This game might be best suited to a preteen who is a novice to videos games and is just learning the controls.

Thanks for reading.
© 2004 barakah59/Mark