A few months ago, Nintendo Power broke the story that Game Arts (the studio that Sakurai contracted to work on Smash Bros. Brawl) had been chosen to work on the TMNT license for Ubisoft. No, there wasn't/isn't a movie coming out (anytime soon), and the only TV show to promote it just got canceled. So surely, since this game is clearly just being made for the sake of making a game, it has to be good, right? Let's find out.

From the time you boot up the demo, you can smell Smash Bros. assets all over it. The character selection screen is almost identical, and the stage select is very similar as well. Character damage meters and the general placement of things all over the game just have a "smash-ish" smell about them, including the controls. You play holding the Wii-mote on its side and the button layout is almost identical to Smash. 1 & 2 provide your light and heavy attacks. Hit them together for a super heavy attack. Up on the D-Pad jumps, etc. You get the point. Essentially, it's Smash-lite with a coat of green paint. That's both a good and bad thing. The good side is that you get a familiar play style, but it's also a bad thing because the TMNT franchise doesn't seem to have enough truly memorable characters to make up a full-fledged fighting roaster. You know almost everybody is just going to want to play as the four brothers themselves, with rare exception.


The overall picture quality wasn't quite as sharp in the demo as the screens imply, but I chalk that up to Ubisoft using crappy Composite cables to set up the demo units. Overall, Smash Up looks really good in motion

The production values are pretty high for a game such as this. The backgrounds are highly detailed, and the environments encourage destruction of your surroundings. There are some cool features like color coding that frankly, Smash Bros. itself could have used as an option. The game will surround your character with a light color coded glow to help you distinguish each other in the cluster filled blur that these types of games can boil down to during multiplayer. It helps to keep things together, and actually works better than a simple name above the character. Combat focuses on depleting your opponents health bars, and there are plenty of obligatory TMNT items included in brawls (Pizza anyone?) as well as "ninja magic" effects. The only major problem in the combat engine seems to be that everything feels too floaty. Jumping physics are slow and it takes seemingly forever to fall to the bottom of the screen. This slows down the combat way more than it should.

Frankly, it was probably a bad idea to base the art direction on that of the recent (2007) movie. Sure, the assets were probably easier to make/obtain, but it gives the aura of a tie-in game, which this clearly isn't meant to be. The story is being written by TMNT co-creator Peter Laird, and Mirage Studios has a deep input level for game content such as character selection. Though it's hard to hear clearly on the convention floor, its pretty clear that all the character voices are pulled from the recently canceled Fox Saturday morning cartoon. Ubisoft also promises that online Wi-Fi play will be included.

All in all, this doesn't look like it will shape up to be a bad game at all, but one has to worry that it won't live up to its full potential. Hopefully Game Arts will see fit to diversify the art style and adjust the combat to the franchise's strengths. You'll keep you informed.