A great arcade game that was successfully ported to the Super Nintendo in fine fashion!
Back in 1992, this was one of the best side-scrollin' beat'em ups anyone could ask for, especially for turtle fans. The game pace was constantly moving with more and more enemies but you were never thrown too many for you to handle making the game completable in over an hour if you knew what you were doing.
The story isn't anything too startling as it pits our four heroes against Shredder who eventually tosses the turtles into different time periods. You'll battle in the future and as well as on pirate ships and the prehistoric era until the turtles get a chance to get back to their time period.
Each four of the turtles have different weaknesses and strengths to make the turtles play slightly different from the others. To compensate for Donatello's long reach with his bo, his speed was hampered while Raphael, because of his short reach with his sais, was given the fastest speed. Unfortunately, he was also given the lowest defense so some enemy hits could kill him in one shot!
There are also many ways to kill enemies from just slashing at them with weapons or grabbing foot soldiers and flinging them around at other enemies. What you can also do is charge at enemies doing massive damage, allowing you to setup even more powerful moves. Lastly, if you hit both the A and B buttons, you'll do a special move that allows your turtle to be invincible shortly and does massive damage to enemies but if you hit, you will lose life.
You'll play through 10 levels full of foot soldiers holding different kinds of weapons and throwing shurikens and manhole covers at you while mousers and roadkill Rodneys keep the action a bit more interesting. Along the way, you'll even have to fight rock soldiers and dinosaurs and many memorable bosses from the show such as Slash and the lovable Bebop and Rocksteady.
The sounds in the game are great too. You can throw foot soldiers into the sky and you can hear it so well, it's almost engraved in my mind! Then there's all the weapon sounds and when the turtles say "Cowabunga!" Though it's not super crisp, it's still very memorable such as the music. Music from the TMNT song and the rest of the songs are played quite well but don't ever get too annoying.
Everything about this game they got right. From the fast gameplay, to the catchy music, it's one of the best turtle games they've ever made. Even after playing some of the Nes games and the Gamecube games, this is by far my favourite and I encourage anyone who wants a trip down memory lane with our greensome foursome, to pick up this game and find out what's it is all about.