Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash Up (Review)

I've been meaning to talk about this one for a while. I approached Smash-Up with some trepidation. Modern Ninja Turtle games aren't that good for one thing and the game seemed way too similar to Super Smash Bros Brawl for its own good. I went the safe route and gave the game a rental and despite my low expectations, I still want my four dollars back. The game was created by most of the same people who worked on Smash Bros, hence the similarities. The only real difference is that while knocking characters out of the arena still counts as a knock out, the characters do have health bars that can be depleted like in a standard fighter.

The game suffers largely from poor controls. The characters' movements are stiff and somehow their jumps are ridiculously floaty. Running and dropping down through platforms are executed by double-tapping, which is awkward in a fast-paced fighting game. The gameplay of Smash Up is characterized by frustrating starts and stops. It take too damn long for a characters' attacking animation to register, so attacking is a pain to do and even worse is the fact that it takes far too long to get up once you are knocked down. I guess its also worth mentioning the stupid wall jump that I thought years of platformers had perfected, but apparently this game is completely clueless as to how the simple maneuver should function. The poor designs choices of some of the arenas make all of these control flaws even worse, most notably the crappy auto-scrolling train stage which tosses characters all over the place.

There's some god-awful mini games that appear in the main arcade mode that seriously make me wonder if anyone on the production staff even checked their work. Really, there's like six of these and none of them are anything good. You can unlock characters by finishing the arcade mode, but the characters are all too similar to one another with little diversity between their fighting styles. I'd have to say if there's one thing that's particularly bad about Smash-Up is just that its boring. The game doesn't even have some form of nostalgia to back it up since as the game "proudly" exclaims, its the first turtles game not based on any show, comic, or movie. Well, maybe if it was there would have been something to enjoy about the game. It wouldn't have been much, but it would have been a tad better than garbage...junk maybe?