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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Smash-Up
October 27, 2009 | 2:32 PM PST
Kombo's Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don't waste your time. This is why we've split our reviews into four sections: What the Game's About, What's Hot, What's Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.
What the Game's About
It is the year 2009, the 25th anniversary of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Retro comics are released, a new movie is announced, Playmates is re-releasing the original toyline, a remake of one of the franchise's best video games is released, an anniversary bus has been touring the country, and 4Kids has made a movie crossing the present day Turtles over with their past incarnations to celebrate the franchise's long-running history.
Amidst all of this, Ubisoft announced that they were partnering up former members of Tecmo's Team Ninja with Super Smash Bros. Brawl developers from Game Arts to produce a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game which will feature a style similar to Nintendo's flagship fight-fest. By sheer virtue of naming the game "Smash-Up" and inviting gamers and fans alike to "join the brawl," Ubisoft has set an open invitation for comparisons to the works of Masahiro Sakurai, and as such, we won't hold back.
What's Hot
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up is a strange beast in that it feels like the half-brother of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, yet at the same time feels quite different. The gameplay is an interesting switch-up from Brawl, in that your goal isn't to damage your opponents enough to knock them out of bounds, but rather, to simply whittle their health down to nothing, thus reducing their stock of lives by one. Of course, that isn't to say that the out-of-bounds gameplay of Brawl is entirely absent; there are some stages which contain automatic scrolling that will take a player out, as well as pitfalls which, while they can often be escaped from through a series of wall-jumps, can spell doom for a lesser player.
Unlike the rather open spaces of Brawl, Smash-Up's stages tend to be rather enclosed, with odd exceptions. But this brings its own dynamic to the gameplay, as each character can not only stick to the wall briefly, and even climb a short ways before performing a nice dash-attack in the direction of their opponents, but they can also interact with many of the stages. Attack the water valve in the sewer, for example, and you'll open a flood of water that washes everyone into a different section full of waterfalls and platforms, where a rampaging crocodile will occasionally come out to snack on fighters who don't heed the game's warnings.
Another way to interact utilizes the Wii Remote's pointer, allowing players to "shoot" the interactive parts of the scenery, triggering whatever they may do. For those opting to use the Classic or GameCube controllers, pressing and holding the L shoulder button will bring up the targeting reticule and allow those players to take their shots. Unfortunately, this leaves your character prone to attack, and oftentimes it is simply easier to just knock your opponent back and attack the scenery with your regular attacks.
On the subject of controller options, Smash-Up takes its lessons well from Brawl, in that one has a full range of options for playing the game: Wii Remote, Wii Remote and Nunchuk, Classic Controller, and GameCube controller. Naturally, the GameCube controller is the weapon of choice, though I also found the Remote/Nunchuk combo to work rather well.
The controls offer a familiar feel to players of Smash, although with some differences. For one thing, trying to escape the pitfalls mentioned above through use of Brawl's third-jump maneuvers is out, as it seems that ninjas, ex-athlete vigilantes, and Rabbids don't possess such a skill.
A skill they do possess, however, is the ability to not let the game's items, known here as "ninja magic," get in the way of their standard attacks. Whereas Brawl contains two jump buttons (in addition to the optional up-tap on the analog), the X button (or whichever one you map it to in the custom controller options), one is instead dedicated to the variety of tricks and traps which pop up on occasion throughout one's matches, leaving the A button free to deliver katana slashes, bo smashes, and my personal favorite, high sticking.
If there is one area in which Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up seems to surpass Nintendo's megahit franchise, it would be in online play. I played several matches online, and they felt smoother than all but my very best online Brawl matches, which have been few and far between. Most of the time, the best I can hope for in Brawl is where the game seems to lag behind me by about a step, but Smash-Up seemed to keep up the pace admirably. One can only hope that Nintendo's next Smash Bros. title can do as well.
What's Not
The biggest problem with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up, to a longtime TMNT fan, is simply that the game feels like it should have been so much more than it is.
Nintendo took arcades and the video game world by storm in 1981 with Donkey Kong, giving them 27 years of history to work from to shape Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which contains all sorts of characters, stages, music, and other nods to the company's video game heritage. Characters from Mario to the Ice Climbers to Captain Olimar to R.O.B. the Robot appear across stages based on the original Donkey Kong, F-Zero, and even Pictochat and Electroplankton, wielding weapons such as Bob-ombs, Pokeballs, and even Super Scopes.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles first appeared on the printed page in 1984, and this year celebrate 25 years of comic books, movies, video games, action figures, a live action TV series, and two long-running animated series. And for the most part, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up completely ignores all of that.
The presentation is a bit of a strange hybrid. Most of the visuals are derived from the 2007 movie, and most of the characters appeared in same. The Shredder is pulled from the 2003 4Kids cartoon. One stage pays homage to the old cartoon with the Technodrome spinning and blasting lasers wildly in the background. To be generous, one bonus feature is an unlockable commercial for the newest DVDs for the classic cartoon (complete with a mis-synched voiceover, but I digress). And really, that's about it.
The character roster, compared to Brawl, is rather thin. While it is true that the original Super Smash Bros. had but 12 characters (eight default, four hidden) to choose from, the fact remains that it was an experimental type of new game released just over ten years ago on lesser hardware that was never expected to leave Japan. And while it is true that Smash-Up does feature four more characters than the original Smash Bros., it is also true that of those characters, three are Ubisoft's Raving Rabbids (a regular Rabbid, a Ninja Turtle-themed Rabbid, and a Splinter-themed Rabbid, to be precise), and one is a recostumed Raphael.
And then going further, there are also the characters of the Utrominator, who is an original character for the game, and a Foot Soldier. Yes, a Foot Soldier, good for when you want a lot of fodder to beat on, but not likely to be a favorite at any parties.
Fortunately, the recostumed Raphael is more distinct than many of the notorious clones seen in the Smash Bros. series. In fact, when garbed as Nightwatcher (his vigilante alter-ego from the 2007 film), Raphael looks and plays completely different, trading in his sai daggers for a set of weighted chains. So while there are technically two Raphaels taking up spots in the roster, at least they are far more distinct than Mario and Dr. Mario.
Another peculiar character in the roster is the Utrominator, as noted above. The character is an Utrom, a race of benevolent brain-like alien beings featured in the original comics and 2003 cartoon, who in turn inspired Krang in the 80s cartoon. Unfortunately, the developers chose to completely forgo any real characterization for their semi-original entity into the Turtles mythos. In the game's story mode, he appears, he fights, but does absolutely nothing else of value or relevance; one can't even tell if he's a good guy (as most Utroms are depicted), or a bad guy, as he seems to fight along all the other foes.
Unfortunately, that's just about all you get. Rather than dipping into the vast history of the TMNT franchise, mixing and matching characters and things in an almost ornate tapestry as Konami's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters did on the Super NES in 1993. As such, there are no Bebop and Rocksteady, there is no Slash, no Tokka and Rahzar, no Wingnut, no Armaggon, no Tatsu, no Venus de Milo or Dragon Lord (though most fans are likely grateful for those particular exclusions), no Ninjara, no Mona Lisa, and so on.
Instead, we are left with the bare-basic staples as headliners: the four Turtles, Splinter, April, Casey Jones, Shredder, and Karai.
Of course, this may have been thanks to TMNT co-creator Peter Laird, who is infamous for his decisions on which characters he might allow into the property at a given time, and is equally infamous for not especially liking the old cartoon. Even so, there are a number of characters who should have fit the mold as Mirage originals and part of the recent cartoon, who could have been included as such but were not: Leatherhead, Baxter Stockman, the Rat King, Hun, the Triceratons, and Agent Bishop, for example.
Of course, many people have also made known their desire to see Miyamoto Usagi, star of the comic Usagi Yojimbo. However, as the character belongs to Stan Sakai, such an arrangement might have been more difficult than Ubisoft was willing to take on, despite having appeared in Konami's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Battle Nexus on the consoles of last generation.
What makes the character selection sting even more is that during the game's development, it was said that it was not beholden to any one version or continuity of the Turtles, and that the characters were chosen by the Turtles' creators at Mirage Studios for the game's story mode. Unfortunately, the story itself really seems phoned in; even with the supplementary comic included in the game's packaging, it feels like nothing more than a weak effort to tie the included characters together in to the almost arbitrary selection of stages which appear.
The basic gist, for those wondering, is that following Splinter's out-of-nowhere idea to hold a tournament (no points for originality), Shredder has Fugitoid captive on the other side of the world, leading to Donatello to use a modified time scepter (a plot device from the original comic, but you can pretend it's the one from the third movie just as easily) to transport the Turtles to Shredder and Fugitoid's location. Unfortunately for them, it malfunctions.
As a result, you have stages that make sense for the Turtles, such as their lair, their HQ, the sewers, and the roofs of New York. And then you have the stages that otherwise make no sense: a wild west town, a train, the Amazon jungle, a flaming ancient Japanese temple, and the Titanic.
Plus, of course, the Technodrome, which is sort of a mixed bag in the overall context.
The Story Mode itself is nothing to write home about. Save for the ending, it plays out the same way for every character. That is, every character allowed to be used; only the starting seven (the Turtles, Splinter, April, and Casey) can take part in it. And while it's enjoyable enough at first, using black-and-white comic scenes drawn by the artists at Mirage (and ably accompanied by voice actors from the recent TV show), you'll likely skip all but the ending on subsequent playthroughs.
At the end, you can unlock other characters, assuming you can determine which character each icon represents. I think the only one I got right was the Shredder. Unfortunately, this only accounts for a few characters; others have to be unlocked through more rigorous means or codes. Also unfortunately, I've yet to complete all 51 of the game's challenges to get Fugitoid, nor have I fought in 120 versus matches to get the Raving Rabbid.
The same code did net both the Ninja Rabbid and Technodrome level, however. And despite filling a slot that might have been better served with a real TMNT character, this one is quite a bit of fun to use.
Unlike Brawl, in addition to unlocking characters, alternate costumes are also unlockables. And while some characters' costumes, such as those belonging to April, Shredder, and Casey Jones hark back to different parts of the recent cartoon, the costumes of the Turtles and Splinter are decidedly mundane and feel almost irrelevant; while most costumes in Brawl seem to recall some part of the character's history or ensemble, the Splinter and the Turtles' costumes do not, instead feeling more like some sort of action figure variants. It would have been a good opportunity to throw in more fanservice, but at least they fared better than Fugitoid and Utrominator, who are among those with no alternate costumes at all.
Then there are the controls. While the controls aren't bad, they seem to be a lot more precise than those found in Brawl, and it could throw players familiar with that game off a bit. Performing special moves that use a combination of pressing a direction with a button can take some getting used to; while in midair, pressing down will hasten your character's descent to a great degree, though you can also press down and an action button for an attack in midair. Unfortunately, zipping down seemed to be more commonplace than performing a downward attack.
In addition, while most of the Brawl basics remain in play, along with new additions such as the wall jump-attacks and flying off of hanging bars, special attacks just aren't that... special. Very nearly everything feels like it comes down to a slash, swipe, or stab of a weapon. Some characters, such as the Utrominator, feature some cool things like gattling-cannon blasts, but otherwise seem to lack the variety found among Brawl's vast ensemble.
Final Word
Despite what one might glean the rather lengthy text above, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up is by no means a bad game; it is in fact quite good, and fun to play, with a variety of online and offline game modes and unlockables to keep one busy. But as noted at the start of this review, the game begs for comparisons to Brawl, and that is what it has gotten. And in that arena, Brawl continues to stand unequaled.
Of course, few, including myself, expected a new game like Smash-Up to be able to equal or surpass the might of Smash Bros., even with the TMNT license. But with 25 years of history behind it, and the promise of the shackles of continuity being thrown off, it was easy to expect so much more than what was delivered. And that is ultimately where Smash-Up disappoints.
To provide an analogy, Smash-Up is like a cupcake. Not a full-sized cupcake, but one of those bite-size cupcakes, and a very tasty one at that. But it is a cupcake without icing, sprinkles, or some of the other good stuff you expect a cupcake to have. And in the end, it leaves one wanting for more. But for what's there, it's rather enjoyable.
Truth be told, there is perhaps a little bit of irony behind TMNT: Smash-Up. Odds are, the less of a TMNT fan one is, the less one knows about the franchise, the more one might enjoy it. Ignorance, after all, is bliss, and someone who doesn't know the franchise very well would likely not think there is anything missing at all, and derive more enjoyment from the title than a game on its own merits. For the rest of us, we can hope that perhaps a sequel will find its way to fruition, and build heavily upon what is a solid foundation.
Of course, with Nickelodeon now owning the Turtles, it remains to be seen if Ubisoft will even get another shot.
What the Game's About
It is the year 2009, the 25th anniversary of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Retro comics are released, a new movie is announced, Playmates is re-releasing the original toyline, a remake of one of the franchise's best video games is released, an anniversary bus has been touring the country, and 4Kids has made a movie crossing the present day Turtles over with their past incarnations to celebrate the franchise's long-running history.
Amidst all of this, Ubisoft announced that they were partnering up former members of Tecmo's Team Ninja with Super Smash Bros. Brawl developers from Game Arts to produce a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game which will feature a style similar to Nintendo's flagship fight-fest. By sheer virtue of naming the game "Smash-Up" and inviting gamers and fans alike to "join the brawl," Ubisoft has set an open invitation for comparisons to the works of Masahiro Sakurai, and as such, we won't hold back.
What's Hot
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up is a strange beast in that it feels like the half-brother of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, yet at the same time feels quite different. The gameplay is an interesting switch-up from Brawl, in that your goal isn't to damage your opponents enough to knock them out of bounds, but rather, to simply whittle their health down to nothing, thus reducing their stock of lives by one. Of course, that isn't to say that the out-of-bounds gameplay of Brawl is entirely absent; there are some stages which contain automatic scrolling that will take a player out, as well as pitfalls which, while they can often be escaped from through a series of wall-jumps, can spell doom for a lesser player.
Unlike the rather open spaces of Brawl, Smash-Up's stages tend to be rather enclosed, with odd exceptions. But this brings its own dynamic to the gameplay, as each character can not only stick to the wall briefly, and even climb a short ways before performing a nice dash-attack in the direction of their opponents, but they can also interact with many of the stages. Attack the water valve in the sewer, for example, and you'll open a flood of water that washes everyone into a different section full of waterfalls and platforms, where a rampaging crocodile will occasionally come out to snack on fighters who don't heed the game's warnings.
Another way to interact utilizes the Wii Remote's pointer, allowing players to "shoot" the interactive parts of the scenery, triggering whatever they may do. For those opting to use the Classic or GameCube controllers, pressing and holding the L shoulder button will bring up the targeting reticule and allow those players to take their shots. Unfortunately, this leaves your character prone to attack, and oftentimes it is simply easier to just knock your opponent back and attack the scenery with your regular attacks.
On the subject of controller options, Smash-Up takes its lessons well from Brawl, in that one has a full range of options for playing the game: Wii Remote, Wii Remote and Nunchuk, Classic Controller, and GameCube controller. Naturally, the GameCube controller is the weapon of choice, though I also found the Remote/Nunchuk combo to work rather well.
The controls offer a familiar feel to players of Smash, although with some differences. For one thing, trying to escape the pitfalls mentioned above through use of Brawl's third-jump maneuvers is out, as it seems that ninjas, ex-athlete vigilantes, and Rabbids don't possess such a skill.
A skill they do possess, however, is the ability to not let the game's items, known here as "ninja magic," get in the way of their standard attacks. Whereas Brawl contains two jump buttons (in addition to the optional up-tap on the analog), the X button (or whichever one you map it to in the custom controller options), one is instead dedicated to the variety of tricks and traps which pop up on occasion throughout one's matches, leaving the A button free to deliver katana slashes, bo smashes, and my personal favorite, high sticking.
If there is one area in which Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up seems to surpass Nintendo's megahit franchise, it would be in online play. I played several matches online, and they felt smoother than all but my very best online Brawl matches, which have been few and far between. Most of the time, the best I can hope for in Brawl is where the game seems to lag behind me by about a step, but Smash-Up seemed to keep up the pace admirably. One can only hope that Nintendo's next Smash Bros. title can do as well.
What's Not
The biggest problem with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up, to a longtime TMNT fan, is simply that the game feels like it should have been so much more than it is.
Nintendo took arcades and the video game world by storm in 1981 with Donkey Kong, giving them 27 years of history to work from to shape Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which contains all sorts of characters, stages, music, and other nods to the company's video game heritage. Characters from Mario to the Ice Climbers to Captain Olimar to R.O.B. the Robot appear across stages based on the original Donkey Kong, F-Zero, and even Pictochat and Electroplankton, wielding weapons such as Bob-ombs, Pokeballs, and even Super Scopes.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles first appeared on the printed page in 1984, and this year celebrate 25 years of comic books, movies, video games, action figures, a live action TV series, and two long-running animated series. And for the most part, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up completely ignores all of that.
The presentation is a bit of a strange hybrid. Most of the visuals are derived from the 2007 movie, and most of the characters appeared in same. The Shredder is pulled from the 2003 4Kids cartoon. One stage pays homage to the old cartoon with the Technodrome spinning and blasting lasers wildly in the background. To be generous, one bonus feature is an unlockable commercial for the newest DVDs for the classic cartoon (complete with a mis-synched voiceover, but I digress). And really, that's about it.
The character roster, compared to Brawl, is rather thin. While it is true that the original Super Smash Bros. had but 12 characters (eight default, four hidden) to choose from, the fact remains that it was an experimental type of new game released just over ten years ago on lesser hardware that was never expected to leave Japan. And while it is true that Smash-Up does feature four more characters than the original Smash Bros., it is also true that of those characters, three are Ubisoft's Raving Rabbids (a regular Rabbid, a Ninja Turtle-themed Rabbid, and a Splinter-themed Rabbid, to be precise), and one is a recostumed Raphael.
And then going further, there are also the characters of the Utrominator, who is an original character for the game, and a Foot Soldier. Yes, a Foot Soldier, good for when you want a lot of fodder to beat on, but not likely to be a favorite at any parties.
Fortunately, the recostumed Raphael is more distinct than many of the notorious clones seen in the Smash Bros. series. In fact, when garbed as Nightwatcher (his vigilante alter-ego from the 2007 film), Raphael looks and plays completely different, trading in his sai daggers for a set of weighted chains. So while there are technically two Raphaels taking up spots in the roster, at least they are far more distinct than Mario and Dr. Mario.
Another peculiar character in the roster is the Utrominator, as noted above. The character is an Utrom, a race of benevolent brain-like alien beings featured in the original comics and 2003 cartoon, who in turn inspired Krang in the 80s cartoon. Unfortunately, the developers chose to completely forgo any real characterization for their semi-original entity into the Turtles mythos. In the game's story mode, he appears, he fights, but does absolutely nothing else of value or relevance; one can't even tell if he's a good guy (as most Utroms are depicted), or a bad guy, as he seems to fight along all the other foes.
Unfortunately, that's just about all you get. Rather than dipping into the vast history of the TMNT franchise, mixing and matching characters and things in an almost ornate tapestry as Konami's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters did on the Super NES in 1993. As such, there are no Bebop and Rocksteady, there is no Slash, no Tokka and Rahzar, no Wingnut, no Armaggon, no Tatsu, no Venus de Milo or Dragon Lord (though most fans are likely grateful for those particular exclusions), no Ninjara, no Mona Lisa, and so on.
Instead, we are left with the bare-basic staples as headliners: the four Turtles, Splinter, April, Casey Jones, Shredder, and Karai.
Of course, this may have been thanks to TMNT co-creator Peter Laird, who is infamous for his decisions on which characters he might allow into the property at a given time, and is equally infamous for not especially liking the old cartoon. Even so, there are a number of characters who should have fit the mold as Mirage originals and part of the recent cartoon, who could have been included as such but were not: Leatherhead, Baxter Stockman, the Rat King, Hun, the Triceratons, and Agent Bishop, for example.
Of course, many people have also made known their desire to see Miyamoto Usagi, star of the comic Usagi Yojimbo. However, as the character belongs to Stan Sakai, such an arrangement might have been more difficult than Ubisoft was willing to take on, despite having appeared in Konami's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Battle Nexus on the consoles of last generation.
What makes the character selection sting even more is that during the game's development, it was said that it was not beholden to any one version or continuity of the Turtles, and that the characters were chosen by the Turtles' creators at Mirage Studios for the game's story mode. Unfortunately, the story itself really seems phoned in; even with the supplementary comic included in the game's packaging, it feels like nothing more than a weak effort to tie the included characters together in to the almost arbitrary selection of stages which appear.
The basic gist, for those wondering, is that following Splinter's out-of-nowhere idea to hold a tournament (no points for originality), Shredder has Fugitoid captive on the other side of the world, leading to Donatello to use a modified time scepter (a plot device from the original comic, but you can pretend it's the one from the third movie just as easily) to transport the Turtles to Shredder and Fugitoid's location. Unfortunately for them, it malfunctions.
As a result, you have stages that make sense for the Turtles, such as their lair, their HQ, the sewers, and the roofs of New York. And then you have the stages that otherwise make no sense: a wild west town, a train, the Amazon jungle, a flaming ancient Japanese temple, and the Titanic.
Plus, of course, the Technodrome, which is sort of a mixed bag in the overall context.
The Story Mode itself is nothing to write home about. Save for the ending, it plays out the same way for every character. That is, every character allowed to be used; only the starting seven (the Turtles, Splinter, April, and Casey) can take part in it. And while it's enjoyable enough at first, using black-and-white comic scenes drawn by the artists at Mirage (and ably accompanied by voice actors from the recent TV show), you'll likely skip all but the ending on subsequent playthroughs.
At the end, you can unlock other characters, assuming you can determine which character each icon represents. I think the only one I got right was the Shredder. Unfortunately, this only accounts for a few characters; others have to be unlocked through more rigorous means or codes. Also unfortunately, I've yet to complete all 51 of the game's challenges to get Fugitoid, nor have I fought in 120 versus matches to get the Raving Rabbid.
The same code did net both the Ninja Rabbid and Technodrome level, however. And despite filling a slot that might have been better served with a real TMNT character, this one is quite a bit of fun to use.
Unlike Brawl, in addition to unlocking characters, alternate costumes are also unlockables. And while some characters' costumes, such as those belonging to April, Shredder, and Casey Jones hark back to different parts of the recent cartoon, the costumes of the Turtles and Splinter are decidedly mundane and feel almost irrelevant; while most costumes in Brawl seem to recall some part of the character's history or ensemble, the Splinter and the Turtles' costumes do not, instead feeling more like some sort of action figure variants. It would have been a good opportunity to throw in more fanservice, but at least they fared better than Fugitoid and Utrominator, who are among those with no alternate costumes at all.
Then there are the controls. While the controls aren't bad, they seem to be a lot more precise than those found in Brawl, and it could throw players familiar with that game off a bit. Performing special moves that use a combination of pressing a direction with a button can take some getting used to; while in midair, pressing down will hasten your character's descent to a great degree, though you can also press down and an action button for an attack in midair. Unfortunately, zipping down seemed to be more commonplace than performing a downward attack.
In addition, while most of the Brawl basics remain in play, along with new additions such as the wall jump-attacks and flying off of hanging bars, special attacks just aren't that... special. Very nearly everything feels like it comes down to a slash, swipe, or stab of a weapon. Some characters, such as the Utrominator, feature some cool things like gattling-cannon blasts, but otherwise seem to lack the variety found among Brawl's vast ensemble.
Final Word
Despite what one might glean the rather lengthy text above, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up is by no means a bad game; it is in fact quite good, and fun to play, with a variety of online and offline game modes and unlockables to keep one busy. But as noted at the start of this review, the game begs for comparisons to Brawl, and that is what it has gotten. And in that arena, Brawl continues to stand unequaled.
Of course, few, including myself, expected a new game like Smash-Up to be able to equal or surpass the might of Smash Bros., even with the TMNT license. But with 25 years of history behind it, and the promise of the shackles of continuity being thrown off, it was easy to expect so much more than what was delivered. And that is ultimately where Smash-Up disappoints.
To provide an analogy, Smash-Up is like a cupcake. Not a full-sized cupcake, but one of those bite-size cupcakes, and a very tasty one at that. But it is a cupcake without icing, sprinkles, or some of the other good stuff you expect a cupcake to have. And in the end, it leaves one wanting for more. But for what's there, it's rather enjoyable.
Truth be told, there is perhaps a little bit of irony behind TMNT: Smash-Up. Odds are, the less of a TMNT fan one is, the less one knows about the franchise, the more one might enjoy it. Ignorance, after all, is bliss, and someone who doesn't know the franchise very well would likely not think there is anything missing at all, and derive more enjoyment from the title than a game on its own merits. For the rest of us, we can hope that perhaps a sequel will find its way to fruition, and build heavily upon what is a solid foundation.
Of course, with Nickelodeon now owning the Turtles, it remains to be seen if Ubisoft will even get another shot.
November 20, 2009
