f13.net forums - TMNT Demo on Fileplanet

Ok so I finally got around to playing this and I'm not really impressed. Short version: usual platformer mechanics, shallow combat, mediocre camera, brings nothing especially new/special to the platformer genre.

Longer version:

It's a platformer with a lot of the usual jumping mechanics like double-jump, wall jumping, etc. Something I hadn't seen before is where you can call on one of your buddies to swing in and push you a little further along when you jump, but this just boils down to a fancy triple-jump. The camera moves around automatically and there doesn't seem to be a way to move it manually. It has a tendency to change mid-jump or just before jumps when it really should have been moving while I was just running around, but nothing drastic so far. A lot of the time I just relied on instinct while jumping around thinking "this is probably the way I'm supposed to jump here" and it worked every time, but a way of moving the camera to check or a better indication of where I was supposed to go would have been nice. There was a "tumbs up" icon which seemed to come up when I was heading in the right direction, but I'm talking about indications in the level design and camera angles themselves. I can see myself in future levels taking leaps of faith and dying because of it.

The combat was a bit of a snoozefest. You have only one attack button and you just spam it while facing the right direction. You can switch in your buddies during combos apparently but I didn't get it to work (I didn't really try very hard either, to be fair). There is a cooldown of what looked to be around 15 seconds on when you can get an assist though so I can't see that being enough to spice up the combat. You can switch turtles at any time, which is most relevant in combat because each turtle has their own health bar, and their fighting mechanics differ slightly. Each turtle seems to have 3 basic mechanics that differ from the other turtles: swing speed, reach, and combos. For example Donatello has the longest reach and the slowest swing speed, while Raphael has the shortest reach and fastest swing speed. The combos look quite different, but in essence it doesn't seem to affect much. As long as you're pointing in the right direction and mashing the attack button it's all much the same really.

Overall I saw nothing at all to recommend the game.

Also the demo is fricken annoying in that it CUTS OUT at 8 minutes like KallDrexx pointed out. What a stupid way to make a demo. Just give us a demo level and let us do with it as we will. And Splinter was really annoying the whole way through. "A family is..." "... your family" "family" "family". SHUT UP SPLINTER GODDAMN!