Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2017) [Arcade]

Groovy!

-Battletoads

So there I was. A billion tiny carnival lights flickered around me. The endless looping crashing crushing din of machines assaulted my senses. The haze of human sweat and excitement stuffed the air. Scraps of cheese bread refused to un-wedge itself from under my heel. I was at Chuck E. Cheese, of course, where a kid can be a kid.

My old man brain pushed through the barricade of LEDs, lasers, and noise: “I wish they just had a single classic game here.” And that’s when I rounded the corner, passing by yet another copse of dinosaur shooters, ticket crunchers, and basketball hoops. Then I saw her face.

Finding a classic 4-player beat ’em up, or at least one based on a classic, was more than I could’ve hoped for. My kid brother and I happily pumped in a few credits and assumed the roles of Leo and Donnie (the latter representing my historical favorite).

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as it was simply called, presented three stages we could choose to play in any order: the sewers, the streets, and pretty sure the third one was the Technodrome. After that came a boss rush and the Shred-Head himself. It’s pretty standard TMNT beat ’em up fare, but I did appreciate the references to Turtles in Time.

I’ll go further than that. This game seemed like an homage to Turtles in Time, that famous, iconic brawling masterpiece of the 16-bit generation that saw the heroes in a half shell hurtling through history. Turtles in Time is such a beloved game that it’s hard to imagine anything could come close to it, even a game deliberately “inspired by” that classic, to borrow the exact phrasing used by Raw Thrills, the developer of this new TMNT game.

However, inspiration isn’t the same thing as emulation, nor should it be. There are enough differences in TMNT to make it worth your romp-time, should you be able to find a cabinet locally, and simultaneously enough differences from Turtles in Time to make you realize it’s an aspirant, not a surrogate. Where Turtles in Time had ambition, TMNT has tradition. Where the former had a unique story, TMNT relies on a familiar premise. Where the predecessor had several different settings, the successor stays in the relative safety of the cityscape. Where the master settled down into its place in the halls of history as an icon, this game, the student, has yet to make a dent.

Still, if you’ve got a friend with you, or are friendly enough to be friends with anyone who walks up and drops a coin in the machine alongside you (highly recommended), you can have a good, albeit brief, enjoyable excursion with this one. Just don’t expect a modern classic. It’s a bit too floaty and unresponsive for that.

Raw Decent Thrills. But still, I’d recommend this game, even to fans of Turtles in Time.

Pixel Perfect

Recommended

Red formerly ran The Well-Red Mage and now serves The Pixels as founder, writer, editor, and podcaster. He has undertaken a seemingly endless crusade to talk about the games themselves in the midst of a culture obsessed with the latest controversy, scandal, and news cycle about harassment, toxicity, and negativity. Pick out his feathered cap on Twitter @thewellredmage, Mage Cast, or Story Mode.