Let me start off by saying that I was a big fan of the turtles when I was younger, but have since lost touch with that love. Not to say that I don't like them now - I simply don't have a dying love for the turtles like I still have for Sonic and Mega Man throughout my life. TMNT was released with the new movie which I enjoyed. I didn't have high expectations for this game: after all, it's only a game based on a movie. TMNT managed to meet my low expectations and nothing more.

(Xbox360 Screenshot)

Just for reference, I played the Wii version of TMNT, and the first noticable thing about the game is that whoever is doing the video-encoding over at Ubisoft needs to be fired. For the few CG cutscenes taken from the movie (and we're talking no more than a maximum of five minutes combined), they all suffer from jumpy framerates and lower than DVD quality - making them obviously pixelated with grainy gradients in their blacks to greys. Even Ubisoft's own opening logo is of poor quality. What gives?

Sorry, I nearly forgot there's a game to review. The game opens by having you spend a level with each turtle individually, allowing you to play through their backstory while they describe it. These opening stories lined up with the movie perfectly, giving me great hope that the rest of the game would too. But it becomes painfully obvious the farther in the game you progress, the looser and looser the story wraps around the movie. This isn't a problem if a movie's game has its own story, but in this case they don't take the time to tell the full story in the game, so if you haven't seen the movie you'll get lost. Plus, you'll have a very anti-climactic battle against the final enemies whose reasons for fighting you are not explained.

(Wii Screenshot)

This is a pretty straight-forward platformer, where you spend around 90% of the game getting around, and 10% actually fighting enemies. Let's start with the part where you run around, because I'd rather talk about something positive. Ubisoft did a great job of putting the "Ninja" back in "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles." The turtles are not slow and clunky, but extremely swift and agile, and I had so much fun simply running through the levels because of it. Swinging on flag poles, running across walls, jumping off rooftops, and crawling across the side of ledges is fast and precise. The controls were responsive and it made running from start to finish a pure joy. The only problem is that you have inifinite lives and you hit a check-point literally every 15 seconds, making the difficulty of these platformer experiences "zero." So thank goodness they're simply a lot of fun.

(PC Screenshot)

The fighting though - yikes. You only have two attack buttons: punch and kick. Kicking only does one type of kick and it only stuns the enemy. So therefore you really only have one attack button: punch. You don't fight enemies as you run through levels though, oh no. Instead you'll periodically run into areas where the level cages you in, throws down a handful of enemies and says "fight!" Then you pretty much hit the punch button over and over and over and over and over and over until your thumb gets tired and your eyes glaze over from seeing the same turtle-specific combo thousands of times. Oh wait, are you playing this on the Wii? Because the punch button isn't a button on the Wii Remote. No, you must swing! I'll tell you, my arm is very, very tired of continuously shaking the Wii Remote. Don't get tired though, because if you do - you won't be able to shake the Wii Remote hard enough for the sensors to pick up that you're trying to attack. Oh, did you want to finish that combo? I'm sorry - you weren't shaking hard enough.

The enemies that you see are not the enemies that you get, because the maximum number of enemies on the screen at one time is sure to have its quota met whenever you kill one of them. Kill one, and another will drop from the sky. You never really know how many enemies will keep dropping in before the game decides you've had enough. Sometimes I would be sitting there thinking, "Good God, how much longer do I have to shake my Wii Remote?"

I beat the game in just under five hours, and I felt like all I did was continually run through levels and stop from time to time to shake my Wii Remote for ten minutes.