Turtles in Time Re-Shelled is a remake of a 1991 arcade release, one that also saw a fairly favourable release on the SNES. A lot of people got really excited when they heard about this game coming out – primarily because they assumed it would be a remake of the SNES title. It's not, Re-Shelled takes its roots from the arcade version, a fact which has managed to transform many of those excited smiles into cries of woe.

When we say ‘remake', we mean exactly that – all that has been accomplished here is a re-jigging of the games graphics and the implementation of analogue directions for player movement and attacks. Given such a bare-bones approach to the game, it's not surprising that the gameplay fails to impress in today's market.

Most of the frustrations with Re-Shelled will become apparent early on. First of all, the game is just dead boring. As side-scrolling beat-‘em-ups go, it's on the dull side of Dullsville, with moronic enemies, unresponsive controls, annoying ‘rock' soundtrack, absolutely atrocious boss battles, all with a light sprinkling of power-ups (all of them unfortunately useless). In fact, the only aspect that might keep your eyelids from closing and your heavy head from drooping is the fact that the graphics are actually quite nice – managing to give the title a pleasant HD face lift. It's just a pity that the game that lies underneath is a bit of a stinker. Let's break down the above complaints further:

Moronic enemies – none of us are strangers to crappy AI, but these guys win their particular appellation for several reasons. For starters, they take around ten seconds to actually decide what to do about a strange, anthropomorphic turtle (or turtles) that look to be bashing up their buddies. Secondly, once they've decided what to do, they take about three weeks to actually decide what to do about it. Then, when they finally manage to get some kind of signal from their jelly-filled brain to the rest of their body, they enter into some magical animation loop whereby they can interrupt any of your attacks. They're also immune to damage for this period of time, which makes them cheating morons, more accurately.

Unresponsive controls – I honestly don't expect much from an arcade port, but surely in this day and age of super electronic programming, the guys responsible for this title could have decided to actually connect the A button to a jump animation within a few seconds of you pushing it. I jest... possibly, but it seemed to me that there were several moments when my poor green hero was locked into yet another awful animation and my multiple presses of the A button elicited nary an on-screen response. This makes it really hard to NOT lose life, as you have to basically try and see the future in order to avoid instigating an attack animation wherein some moron enemy will interrupt your attack with their own, while you're unable to actually jump out of the way with any kind of immediacy.

Annoying rock soundtrack – I guess this could get filed under ‘personal preference', but I doubt that many people who bought the game are our there trying to track down an "Awesome MP3 of that totally rocking Turtles arcade game!”

Atrocious boss battles – there are only a handful of these, but every single one will make you groan. Sometimes the bosses can be beaten by jumping around the place mashing the X button and hoping that you hit them before they hit you. This is how I killed most of them, actually. But others will, of course, originate from Cheating Boss Land and will interrupt your attacks with ease, become invincible and follow you around the screen like an overzealous blowfly following the strong whiff of excrement. I didn't enjoy any of the boss battles and rather than feeling any kind of accomplishment on killing them all I felt was relief. Relief that I'd never have to fight that stupid boss again.

Useless power-ups – Get this, a pizza power-up gives you health! I know, genius. And then there's this other power-up that turns you into a spinning top for around three seconds. Look, if you're any sort of modern day gamer this is the sort of child-hood title that we've all moved past. It's probably a bit of fun for young kids, but for anyone else, save your MS Points for Shadow Complex instead.