Nickelodeons Teenage Muntant Ninja Turtles the video game for xbox 360

Last month I did Ninja Turtles month on my YouTube channel and did reviews and talked about a lot of the Ninja Turtles games in my collection. 2 of these games stand out for the wrong reason but which was worst. Both are based on the Nick version, both published by Activision, and both weren’t that good. But which was worst one of them called out of the shadow was only 15 dollars when it was first released and was a broken game that had almost no QA, visual bugs everywhere, and poor AI in a game where if an AI controlled partner went down it would mean that your game would end in defeat. But Out of the Shadows (and if I have a time I will put up a review hub of that) did at least try. Even though the graphics were fugly it was at least trying to be a deeper ninja turtle game with an RPG like hub leveling up and more open world design compare to the other brawlers. Ultimately however its flaws just over whelmed its good points and it just folded under them into crappy unfinished rush game territory.

The game I am going to be reviewing today though is the next game Activsion published game called “Nickelodeons Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” It doesn’t have the bugs that out of the shadows had, but in its place it does nothing interesting. It tries to be a throwback to the classic arcade game but just flat out misses the point on why those games were fun. They were fast pace, this game isn’t. They had some violent animations and sound effects to let us know we were hitting enemies this one doesn’t. And they were also challenging, this game is way too easy. So let’s break it down on why Nickelodeons Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The Story in this game is really simple. Basically the Turtles find out that the Foot and the Krang have teamed up to mutate New York City with some sort of mutagen bomb and have to stop it. Basically every stage has them chasing the latest villain the bomb, defeat villain and that villain tells them that the next villain has it and they will never be able to stop it. Repeat process until next to last stage when you finally stop the bomb only to find April o Neil has been kidnap by Shredder again (didn’t they make her a lot more stronger feisty character this time around and she’s still getting captured, the more things change the more they also stay the same)

Has far has graphics go for this game they are ok. They do look like the show at least from afar, however things go bad whenever it pulls in for a like a cut scene. The character sprites look like they came out of a late generation Nintendo gamecube and not out of a late generation xbox 360. Luckily the way the games camera is set up is to zoom out of the gameplay area and only show it to one side similar to an arcade brawler, you only notice how sloppy they look when the camera is zoom in. Still while the models too look outdated they do at least fit the show unlike TMNT out of the shadows.

Sound wise the game is ok, we get most of the voice actors from the Nick series back to reprise their roles minus Jason Biggs and Clancy Brown who do have decent covers (in fact the cover for Leo is so good he finished the 2^nd season for Biggs when Biggs left the show) and the music is ok. My problem with the sound though comes with sound effects, or just not enough of them and not loud enough. Part of an old school brawlers charm was the sound effect of whamming into an opponent. Especially in a turtles game, but you never get that in this one. You never hear your attacks hitting an enemy, and to make matters worse the animation for the turtles don’t change weather they hit an enemy or not. This mistakes make an already bad situation all the more worst.

Nickelodeon Teenage Muntant Ninja Turtles is a hard game to review, for one reason it has no big negatives, but then it also takes no risks and that is it’s fatal flaw. Out of the Shadows is a terrible game but it took risks. It had an RPG tree, a complex battle system, and was trying to make the designs for the Turtles more adult. This one you feel the designers were just cruzing through development. How bad is the laziness, bad enough that there is a simple pro tip I can offer everyone to beating this game without breaking a sweat.

Tommy’s pro tip to beating this game without breaking a sweat.

Mash the X button and occasionally press Y on the controller.

No I am not kidding this game is ridiculously easy the enemies don’t offer much of a fight, they do no damage, and even though your lugging all 4 turtles around at once your AI partners don’t do much. The only thing moving around on screen sometimes feels like the guy your moving around. The game is just ridiculously easy, and because there is no depth or challenge to it, it’s no fun whatsoever $6. The game tries to pretend it has depth by allowing you to press Y to throw enemies either in garbage cans or at the screen, but it’s stil just really button mashing.

Oh but there is more to this game there are also secrets and it also has a level up tree sort of. Ok in some stages there are canisters of mutagen that can be picked up. Picking these up and collecting balls of light that enemies drop can allow you to unlock longer combos, or more health for your turtles. But you don’t have to overly grind to beat the last guy. Unlock the basic upgrades to your turtles and the last stage and Shredder will still be ridiculously easy.

Yeah I guess I should talk about the achievement’s in this game there pretty much basic. Find all the mutagen, unlock all the moves, and play some of the survival and time attack modes. All in all about 12 hours is all you need to unlock all 1,000 points in this game. Catch is you’re going to be playing this game for 12 hours.

This games main sin is that it’s just boring. It’s not buggy, it’s not broken, all the basics are there but it never goes beyond that. It’s just a button mashing brawler that offers no fun in its design. It takes about 4 hours to beat the game normally, and if you want a perfect achievement score 12 hours, but it’s 12 hours in this, so it’s not 12 hours you’re going to be having any fun.