Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2

Let's cut to the chase. What we have here is quite possibly one of the worst games we encountered at E3 2004, no two ways about it.

Disclaimer from ed - this might not be as bad as Jackie Chan Adventures... continue...

Last year's multi-platform Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles release was no doubt a disappointing 'addition' to the Ninja Turtles franchise/legacy, and with many of the original team members that developed the arcade Turtles games supervising the project, it was quite surprising at just how mediocre last year's game turned out. The GBA version was really the only decent one of the bunch.

A year later, a sequel is already waiting in the wings with results even more disastrous than before.

That's not to say that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 is without its good points. On the contrary, the one good thing TMNT 2 brings to the table that was lacking in the previous version(s) is a 4-player multiplayer mode, allowing players to finally relive some of the great 4 player action provided by the past Ninja Turtles arcade games.

However what initially seems to be a blessing appears to be a trade-off for the all-important gameplay.

So what's wrong with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, you might ask? Well where should we start? Basically just take almost every gripe people have had about 3D games since the beginning of time, toss them into a hat and take your pick.

The camera angles for instance, while not overly bad still could use some work. Some of the jumping portions of the game were an exercise in frustration, there was one area in particular that I must've retried 12 times before finally landing on that blasted 3rd moving platform. If that wasn't annoying enough, take the game's sometimes unresponsive controls that had a mind of their own, toss in the annoying battle against the monstrous SPASMOSAUR which took almost 20 minutes to complete and you have yourself one long and painfully annoying demo.

On the GBA front the TMNT 2 game faired slightly better due to the simplicity of the side scrolling gameplay, but still remained a forgettable experience. What was originally a decent side scrolling beat -em up with last year's GBA release has been reduced to what now appears to be a boring collect-a-thon and the fact that the turtles were unarmed and had to find and obtain their weapons many times during their missions only served to solidify the misery that is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2. Like the console versions, the GBA version/edition will reportedly support 4-player action via the link up cables and contain over 40 levels to play through with access to multiple routes and hidden levels.

When all is said and done, I'd love to take comfort in the belief that since these were E3 demos the final versions will be significantly improved but that would require a drastic overhaul in every department and frankly I just don't see that happening.

Given how indistinguishable the E3 demos of last year's versions were to their final releases I think what we saw at E3 is ultimately what we're going to end up with in the end, a shame really.

Joseph Jackson
Staff Writer, Kikizo Games