Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Screenshots

Notes

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a side scrolling beat em up based on the beloved, and sometimes abused, franchise. Actually there are several TMNT games on the GBA. Confusingly, this one is based on the 2003 animated series. There's another, just titled TMNT (the acronym, not spelled out) released in 2007, based on the movie. But that's for another time.


At the beginning you pick your turtle from the 4, and get down to it. Initially I thought the game was insanely short after I beat the 4 acts with the first character in less than an hour. But as it turns out the 4 turtles have significantly different paths, rather than it just being a different character on the same levels, and I went through them all. There are some collectible secret crystals to find, but I didn't really bother with them.


The story is nothing special but it gets the job done. A mad scientist has created some robot dogs and is using them to terrorise the turtles and April O'Neil, so they go to kick his ass and discover that Shredder is really behind it. Also Casey and Raph just beat up some gang members.


The basic gameplay is simple sidescrolling beat-em-up stuff, on a single plane (no moving towards/away from the camera). Just mashing the basic combo is enough to beat normal easily enough, but there are other combos and charge moves that are kind of fun to pull off. The 4 turtles play pretty similarly, with the same inputs giving differently animated combos, but I didn't really have to change my style. There are some minigame levels too. Here's a quick summary of each turtle's path:

Leonardo:
Act 1 - Beating up robot dogs, dudes, and crawling through the sewers. Not much to say.
Act 2 - Kind of a rail shooter, driving a car through the sewers you shoot down incoming robot dogs. Kind of "boss fight" with a steel door while waves of dogs attack.
Act 3 - Beating up foot ninjas, science goons, and more doggos in a lab. The science dudes with guns gave me a little trouble.
Act 4 - Boss fight against a weird chicken walker robot. Just avoid his attacks and wail on his head. Missles are slightly hard to avoid. I did actually die once here.

Raphael:
Act 1 - Beat up a ton of gang members in the city streets.
Act 2 - Boss fight with Casey. Dodge one of his hits, hit him until he falls over, repeat.
Act 3 - Weirdly hard race minigame vs Casey. You basically need to memorise the course as there's no time to react to stuff and go fast enough to win.
Act 4 - A kind of arena fight with an AI controlled Casey, ending in a gang boss fight.


Donnatello
Act 1 - Beat up some gang members in the city streets.
Act 2 - Going through a lab with more ninjas and science goons. Has some more platformer elements/obstacles. They don't work that well...
Act 3 - Escaping on a glider in a side scrolling shooter minigame.
Act 4 - Boss fight with 2 invisible ninjas. You turn on heat vision, get a few hits in, and repeat.

Michaelangelo
Act 1 - Beat up ninjas and science goons in subway tunnels.
Act 2 - Crazy skateboarding minigame where you're going down a tunnel avoiding barrels and grabbing crystals.
Act 3 - Light (and annoying) platforming over some lava, plus fights with unique monster enemies.
Act 4 - Arena fight with some more monsters.

...and then finally you fight your way up Shredder's tower to fight the man himself, which is actually a fairly tough fight.


Overall, it's a solid enough game, although still quite short even after beating all the turtles and the extra stage for the final ending. The fighting isn't that nuanced or challenging, on normal anyway. Nothing that hasn't been done better before, but not actively bad either.