Teenage mutant ninja turtles

Teenage mutant ninja turtles

Teenage mutant ninja turtles

Heroes in a half shell, turtle power

One player only just makes me glower

Sorry, I hate to begin a review on such a negative note but I was honestly expecting some 4 player, or at a minimum, 2 player co-operative gaming and unfortunately with TMNT being a single player only game, this isn't the case.

Sadly with no Xbox Live Arcade release of the old arcade classic TMNT game due to licensing rights, fans looking for some updated 4 player action, or fans of the numerous Xbox TMNT games looking for an updated next-gen version of their favourite irradiated terrapins are going to have to keep waiting. If you can't, then you're just going to have to make do with a pretty sub par effort from Ubisoft, who are generally one, if not the strongest publisher for our beloved Xbox.

Based on the movie currently doing the rounds in cinemas which my seven year old son is pretty keen to see, I thought it would be interesting to see how much he enjoyed this game. So I sat down for a few hours, got about half way through it myself and handed it over to him. Now before some child welfare people start phoning me, his time on the Xbox is regulated to 45 minutes 4 times a week... Saying that, he was able to get up to the final boss in 3 solid sessions and rack up 920 achievement points (there's 1000 but we've yet to beat the final boss) in the process! Yes, the Xbox 360 now has a new barometer for Gamerscore whoring and its name is TMNT.

Looking back, I'm glad that I handed the game over to my son to play as TMNT is obviously geared towards kids. There's no challenge to any adults as it's almost impossible to die. If you get beaten down it's just a matter of pressing ‘A' as fast as you can until you're back on your feet. If you fall down a hole you respawn just before the last checkpoint and thankfully there are plenty of them. There's no need to save anywhere and the fighting controls lack any sort of decent combo moves and are extremely simple. During many of the levels you're on your own with a single turtle but thankfully throughout most of the game all 4 Ninja Turtles are available to you, but.. they're not all on the screen at once and you switch between them with the ‘X' button. That's right, when you switch between characters your current one does a little spin move and turns into the next one! To make this sound even stranger, combo moves between the brothers are available and once the move is completed, the second turtle disappears back into, well, into the void somewhere, and you're solo again.

The fighting moves are controlled by hitting ‘B' to attack and hitting it a couple of times unleashes the combo moves for each character. The ‘Y' button does kick attacks and holding either button down lets you charge up for a bigger attack. ‘A' is the jump button and to help clear larger gaps, you can perform a handy double jump by hitting ‘A' again at the apex of your jump. Not a new gameplay mechanic, but one we're all familiar with. Pressing ‘X' lets you switch to the other brothers (as discussed above) but holding ‘X' down unleashes a cool tag move that differs depending on which turtle you're currently using. There's also a nifty tag-jump move to help clear even the biggest of gaps so it seems that Ubisoft has spent some time thinking up cool stuff to do in the game, and with that in mind one can only guess as to why 2 or 4 player co-operative action was omitted.

The levels take place in the city streets of New York, the sewers, the jungles, the city roof tops and are laid out in a linear fashion with no room for exploration. The graphics in the levels are fairly basic but there are a few nice touches here and there such as reflections and plants that bend as you move through them. The problem is that there seems to be more time spent clambering over roof tops than actual fights. But when the fights kick in, you'll find yourself facing quite a large number of enemies at once.

It's not uncommon to be surrounded by over a dozen or more so taking them all down can be fun, it just would have been more fun if there were more moves available. The framerate stays solid during the fights, even with the screen full of bad guys but sadly each soldier you encounter is just an exact double of the one next to him. This I can understand with The Foot Clan as they're all masked but the rest of the cronies you take down only feature a small number of different character models so you find yourself surrounded by 10 guys that all look the same quite often.

As you finish each level you're graded on how quickly you completed it, how many coins you collected (they're scattered around each level), how well you did in combat and how good your team work was. Depending on how well you did you're rewarded in shells that you can spend on artwork, cheats and videos in the ‘Extras' section.

So after 5 hours leaping around the levels surprisingly, in Prince of Persia fashion, taking out hundreds of repetitive enemies and beating all the bosses, except the last one that just refuses to die and insists on robbing us off those final 80 Achievement points, is TMNT any fun? Well yes it is. If you can get over the extremely repetitive nature it's a great game for the kids that stays in touch with the lighter tone of the current movie which is obviously also aimed at kids. The darker tone of some of the TMNT comics that I remember from my younger days is missing but the game isn't any worse off due to that. If you can get over that there's only one player supported and the kids are nagging for a game, then take a look as the number of kids games on the 360 is pretty slim, and this fills that gap nicely.