Cowabunga!

Teamwork allows you to pull off fancy special moves.

Turtles wouldn't be Turtles without some gratuitous cartoon violence, ninja style. Leonardo (Swords), Raphael (Sai), Michelangelo (Nunchakus) and Donatello (Bo staff) don't carry their weapons around just for show, and the game naturally offers piles of bad guys to beat up. The fast rush through levels is occasionally interrupted by stops for combat, and you need to whack down a predetermined number of enemies before you can proceed in the level.

Initially the combat just felt laughably easy, but once you figure out that the challenge is in dispatching the enemies as smoothly as possible and without getting hit at all, things do get a bit harder. While you can proceed just fine by randomly button-mashing your way past these bits, true ninjas set their goals higher and go for cool tag-team moves, trying to beat the bad guys with style. After each combat stop you are rated on your performance, and only those who pass the fight without taking any hits at all earn the rank of Ninja. In a way the combat is set to be easy enough for even a young turtles fan to pick up the game, but for more seasoned gamers there is the second level of challenge - style, speed and rankings.

Low Tech Turtles

Low tech visual effects.

TMNT was developed as multi-platform title with simultaneous launch on just about every gaming system there is, and in this case the game is identical across the platforms (with the big exception of the GBA version - Ed), and if you ignore the different resolution, it looks pretty much the same on PC, Xbox 360, PS2, GameCube and Wii. While the textures suffer in many spots for this and there is a distinct lack of visual candy, the upside is that TMNT on the PC will run on just about any system with a video card. I mean, you'd have to dig up a GeForce 4 MX before you could not play the game, and unlike many other current games, TMNT actually runs on an old system without problems. Yes, if you use the minimum setup with something like a 64MB GeForce 3 straight from the ancient dark ages (that would be the year 2001), the frame rate will stutter a bit at times, but the game is still playable. It also means that today's low budget cards such as GeForce 6200 and Radeon X300 are actually barely OK for the Turtles. All that is really required is PS1.1 support and 64MB video memory.

For those with a real video card, TMNT sadly offers nothing extra - the one and only video setting in the game is the resolution switch, and for any recent gaming PC, you can easily bump it as high as it goes. Turtles will still run at 100fps+, and there is plenty of spare power to run high AA and AF.

Dashing over the rooftops of New York.

Train surfing, Turtles style.

The controls have been ported pretty well for the keyboard together with PC-specific instructions on screen, but it's clear that Turtles is meant to be played with an analogue gamepad, so either a Xbox 360 pad or one of the PS2-style analogue clone pads is definitely the best way to play. While the initial key and gamepad mappings are great, the lack of control configuration is also annoying. You can just plug in the Xbox 360 controller and play without any need to change anything, but if you'd want to adjust something, you are out of luck unless you drop down to editing the configuration files with the Notepad.