Reviewed: December 5, 2004
Reviewed by: Mat Houghton

Publisher
Konami

Developer
Konami

Released: October 19, 2004
Genre: Action
Players: 4
ESRB: Everyone

7
6
6
7
7.0

Supported Features:

Shredder has something different in mind in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Battle Nexus, when he has our heroes teleported to a distant planet with no way to get home. Fortunately the Turtles befriend a scientist trapped in a robot body who can send them back home, if they collect enough crystals to power his teleporter. Sneaky combat action ensues.

Second, to facilitate your sneaking around to avoid a beating there are alcoves all over the levels for you to hide in or climb up to the next platform in which adds a faux 3-D aspect to the game that is used fairly effectively. Third each Turtle has their own unique capabilities requiring you to utilize all of them if you want to get every crystal out of every level.

In addition to all of that there are little interstitial levels that are either a timed run through a vertical shaft, or side scrolling vehicle missions, or a “flight simulator” where you shoot things as they advance toward the screen; these all go to break up what would otherwise get to be a very repetitive game. The stages themselves are themed as well, so you explore prisons, jungles, and military facilities, each with their own dangers, puzzles, and challenges to overcome.

Needless to say that there’s a lot of variety to this title. If you include the bonus racing and versus modes you can see that they really went out of their way to provide a lot of play into a little title.

The problems with the game are that the controls are more than a little clunky. The Turtles just aren’t very responsive sometimes and they just don’t feel nimble. I found myself needing to hit the button two or three times on occasion to get Mikey to hide in an alcove. Combat timing and distances are also a bit chancy. Sometimes you can juggle, sometimes you can hit them as they are getting up, but neither can be achieved with what would be considered regularity. This isn’t bad enough to ruin your play time, but it is enough to be frustrating at times.

I did mention that Konami went to great lengths to try to mitigate the repetitiveness of the game, which is a good thing, because if they had not then this game would get boring after you played a level for the third time. It’s great that each Turtle has their own variations on play controls (Raphael sticks to walls, Mikey can glide and throw his weapon) but that still doesn’t completely eliminate the grunt work that has to be done in order to complete levels.

Yeah any Turtle can complete any stage, but to get enough crystals to move on you’ll have to go through a stage two and three times utilizing all the Turtles’ skills to gather all of the crystals. Early on this isn’t a problem because the stages are pretty short, but later when the start getting significantly bigger and you have to go back for one crystal not because you couldn’t find it but because you didn’t have the right Turtle, it gets a little annoying.

Also, when I said that all of the Turtles have their own little fighting styles I was kind of lying. Yeah, three of them do but Leonardo doesn’t have anything going on for him. He’s only there because the franchise has four Turtles. Essentially you end up with three characters that you use and a fourth that you don’t because he doesn’t do anything that the others can’t. This isn’t a fanboy issue, just a game mechanics one. If you have four characters and are going to make them have differences that must be capitalized on, then make all of them useful; otherwise the extra content is just unnecessary.

Character sprites aren’t too complicated, but they are detailed enough to be expressive and the animation helps this along. Each turtle has his own little methods for combat and movement, which is nice to see instead of some stock movements just switching, out the weapons. The enemies by contrast are more of the faceless minion variety, but the bosses are highly unique and the levels have their own little touches of flavor.

There isn’t really too much in the way of effects for this game, some lasers, or electricity columns, but nothing that jumps out at you. Basically look at this like one of the earlier Mega Man titles and you’re hitting the mark. Nothing bad, just nothing to write rave reviews about.

The dialogue has some limited voice use (mostly just an intro read) and I think they actually used the voice actors from the show, so that’s a nice tie in. However, the lines being read are at best non-sequiturs, and American cartoon voice actors are not the greatest.

Music is passably background. It fits what’s going on, but doesn’t go out of its way to intrude on your attention. This goes for the sound effects as well, except for the power meter you get for vehicle weapons which you can hold down to charge, the full meter noise is down right grating after the third or fourth hear, but it’s so useful that you have to put up with the noise.