WiiMNT

TMNT the video game was released in March to coincide with the release of TMNT the movie. The movie really reminded me of everything I loved about the Turtles from my youth, including the tremendous arcade-style video games that came out back when Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were considered the pinnacle of home video gaming. While the new game was released on all the standard consoles a few months ago, there was really only one version I had any desire to play. I mean really, what better use is there for a Nunchuck controller than controlling a nunchuck?

Like most movie tie-ins, the plot of the game is essentially the same as the movie, but told through the Turtles’ point of view. That means more action and less plot, which is certainly a good thing if you already know the story or don’t particularly care about it. Throughout the game you play as all four Turtles (and the Night Stalker), making your way through Central America and the sewers and rooftops of New York City before storming the headquarters of Max Winters to take on the four stone generals. Along the way, you get to kick the snot out of some street thugs, Foot soldiers and Bigfoot. There’s nothing revolutionary about TMNT, but it’s still a hell of a lot of fun.

The real joy of the game, which is the case in nearly every game on the Wii, is in the control scheme. TMNT takes a page out of the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess playbook and makes the Wiimote your sword (or sai or bo staff or nunchuck). Simple shake the controller and you whip out your weapon, creating all kinds of cool combos without even trying. Likewise, shake the nunchuck and you’ll perform a jump kick move. The A button jumps, and the B button uses Bro Power (don’t worry; I’ll explain that in a bit). That’s really all there is to it. The simplicity of the controls are what made the game so engrossing; you get the gist of them almost instantly and can then work on combining them together to perform more complex actions.

That’s where the fun really comes in. These guys are ninjas, so obviously they have cool ninja abilities. They can run up walls. They can run along walls. They can do flips on flagpoles. They can jump back and forth between facing walls to scale them. And the transition between all these moves is seamless. The controls respond much quicker than most video games, so the game is actually able to react just as quickly as the player can.

But then again, the control scheme has its problems. If you’re too close to a wall and try to jump while using the analog stick to guide your character in a certain direction, chances are you’ll inadvertently execute a wall run. Sure, it’s a cool looking move, but accidentally falling into the same pit for the twelfth time in a row is a little annoying. Also, the jump kick charge move, which you execute by tilting the nunchuck to the side, is a little overly sensitive. Your character will freeze into the pre-move stance quite often if you’re not paying close attention to how you hold the controller. It doesn’t help matters that the move isn’t explained very well during the training levels. It took me until almost the last level before I realized what I was doing wrong.

Unfortunately, even though the franchise practically screams for a four-player co-op game mode, TMNT is only a one-player game. Playing with three of you friends with all four Turtles on screen at once would be great, but the format of the game just doesn’t allow for that. Each level is a series of battles split up by extended periods of running around… but it’s not as boring as that sounds. When not battling street thugs or the Foot, you use your ninja skills to climb buildings, swing from flagpoles, and evade lasers to traverse rooftops, sewers, caves and office buildings. Finding the proper combination of moves and executing them as quickly as possible adds an element of solving puzzles to the classic run-and-jump game play.

Although the game format doesn’t allow for multiplayer action, that doesn’t mean TMNT doesn’t take advantage of having four different Turtles at your disposal. Each Turtle has a unique ability: Raph can scale walls with his sais; Leo can phase through walls; Mike can hover by spinning his nun chucks overhead; Don can propel himself across holes when the ceiling is to low to jump. On the levels when you have control of more than one Turtle, you can execute multi-character Bro Power moves. During running sections, you can only use Bro Power to launch yourself across great distances by getting a boost from another Turtle. During fights, each Turtle once again has his own special Bro Power attack which causes significantly more damage than standard attacks. Finding the right Bro Power attack to defeat enemies is essential to completing the game.

Here’s the bad news: it’s only going to take you an afternoon to do that. Even though I watched all the cut scenes and performed remarkably slow on a few levels, I completed the game in a little less than six hours. I finished nearly every level the first time through with sufficient stats to unlock all the extras, so there was really no reason to go back through and play them again. By playing the game, you unlock mini-games and virtual reality training levels, but none of them are much fun. TMNT has practically zero replay value.

The worst part is I really wanted to play the game more. This is a game I sat down and played for six hours straight, which isn’t something I do very often. It had me hooked, and then left me hanging at the end. Thank goodness I rented this with the Blockbuster Game Pass instead of forking over $50 to buy it, or I’d probably think a lot less of the game than I do.