A Brawl 25 Years In The Making.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are partnering with Ubisoft to celebrate their 25th Anniversary with a brand new game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up. This is the first Ninja Turtles video game that is not directly tied to a movie, television show or comic book. The 4-player action brawler features a variety of battle modes including online multiplayer gameplay, minigames, and an original story mode for single player co-created with Peter Laird. |
Professional Reviews
IGN.com 7 of 10
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have ridden a few waves of popularity over the course of a couple decades and in that time they've starred in quite a few videogame adaptations... including standalone fighters. Games like TMNT Tournament Fighters on the Super NES and Genesis, and TMNT Battle Nexus and Mutant Melee on the last generation of systems explored the one-on-one brawling design, an idea that certainly fits these characters. The unfortunate thing is that the designs weren't exactly high quality -- and that's putting it nicely...The Smash Bros. foundation definitely enables the designers to create some good looking environments and impressive character models. There are even arenas that alter their look and structure during the battle, either automatically or after a particular move: the sewer that gets blasted with pressurized water to send the combatants into a new area is one of the cooler effects in the game. But where the in-game visuals are pretty decent, Smash-Up's cutscenes are absolutely dreadful. I'm convinced that the development team had bigger and better things for the storytelling but ran low on time and budget, and what we're seeing is just storyboard-like animatics for the CG that was originally going to be in the game. The art, clearly a throwback to the original comic (and lifted out of the "limited edition" comic included in the box), just looks horrible and animates with the awkwardness of someone learning Flash for the first time...Like I said, there's really nothing particularly bad about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up (well, except for the dreadful Arcade Mode cutscenes). It's a fun, frantic fighting game that has a solid foundation. That foundation -- and I know I'm sounding like a broken record at this point -- is Smash Bros., and the designers don't make any effort to hide from that fact...The game does a good job mimicking the classic fighter with TMNT characters, but in all honesty the game really just makes me want to play Smash Bros. instead. Smash-Up is a good game for those that really want a decent TMNT fighter, but it doesn't do a whole lot to make it its own experience.
- Craig Harris
