TMNT: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled Review – Summer of Shells

Today, I take a trip through time and nostalgia with everyone’s favorite mutant turtles as I review the third game in the Xbox Live Arcade Summer of Arcade series: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled.

Who hasn’t looked forward to this one?

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time is quite possibly the most beloved Turtles experience that the late ’80s/early ’90s brought us. For a kid who grew up on the Turtles, reading the comics, watching the cartoons, buying the action figures, and playing all of the video games, seeing this classic reborn is like literally taking a trip through time and back to my childhood.

Ubisoft brought us a port of the original TMNT coin-op classic back in 2007, but that was more or less a direct port with no modernized graphics or gameplay settings. Though it did include online multiplayer via Xbox Live, it was still more or less exactly like the original.

With Turtles in Time, Ubisoft chose to re-shell re-build the game from the ground up, creating a whole new experience out of the classic arcade game. They have re-built the entire user interface, upgraded the character visuals to a gorgeous high definition in 2.5D, added widescreen support, re-mixed and re-mastered the original music, and re-created all of the backgrounds for each of the classic levels; all the while they kept with maintaining the look and feel of the original, keeping much of the same color palette that makes the Turtles the Turtles and not letting the gameplay lose that classic feel.

While I am impressed by the new visuals and overall quality of the game, I was a little disappointed that they didn’t include the option to use the game’s original visuals for that little extra piece of nostalgia, but that’s hardly anything to complain about.

This new rendition of the game includes new difficulty options with Easy, Normal, Hard, and Hardcore modes. The new difficulty settings, coupled with the re-worked AI, makes for a much better overall console gaming experience designed around fun-driven gameplay instead of the old arcade style coin-sucking mayhem.

Single-player and multi-player modes include Story, Survival, and Quickplay modes. Story mode is very much what you’d expect the port of the classic arcade game to be, taking you through the game stage-by-stage, boss-by-boss. Survival sets you up with a single life for that extra challenge that will let the more hardcore gamer test their abilities and see how far they can get. Quickplay simply offers quick access to levels you’ve already completed in Story mode, allowing you to re-visit them for fun or to pick up an achievement you missed without having to replay the entire game.

Multi-player is exactly what you’d expect and hope it would be, allowing all four of the half-shelled heroes to work together in local co-op, via Xbox Live, or a mix of the two. I’m enjoying this new XBLA trend of games allowing local and Live multiplayer to meet, but I’m still ticked off at the old trend. Sometimes I want to play digital Catan with people in the same room, dang it. Oh well.

Each of the Turtles is unique, and not simply due to their colors and weapon of choice. In Turtles in Time each turtle has his own stats including Speed, Range, Defence, Rush Attack, and Special Attack. Donatello (my personal favorite) for instance is very slow, but his other stats are some of the highest all around. While Raphael is very fast, but his other stats suffer a great deal.

It’s only when all four of the Turtles combine that they truly become a force to be reckoned with, making multi-player a unique and much more worthwhile experience than the original TMNT arcade classic.

When all is said and done, Turtles in Time was a great game, and it still is. Ubisoft did a wonderful job re-creating the game and bringing it into the modern age of gaming.

I give it 8.5/10.

Tags: arcade, Live, re-shelled, Review, summer of arcade, teenage mutant ninja turtles, tmnt, turtles in time, ubisoft, XBLA, Xbox 360