Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Smash-Up

Ubisoft got Game Arts to build a Turtles brawler at the exact moment that studio was fresh off work on Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and the lineage is not subtle. Four fighters on a single plane, percentage-free but ring-out-friendly arenas, light attacks chained into launchers, a roster pulled from every corner of a franchise celebrating its twenty-fifth birthday. The Wii release was the headline version. The PlayStation 2 edition arrived alongside it, stripped of motion control and running on hardware that had already been retired in all but name.

What separates it from the obvious comparison is how much the stages interfere. Arenas deform, flood, collapse and reconfigure while you fight, so the ground you learned in the first twenty seconds often is not there in the last ten. It is a good idea executed with more enthusiasm than precision: the hazards can decide a round before either player lands anything meaningful, and in a four-way match the screen becomes a scramble to read what the level is doing rather than what your opponent is.

The cast is the real appeal for anyone who grew up with the comics and the cartoons. Beyond the brothers you get Splinter, Shredder, Karai, Casey Jones and a handful of deeper cuts, each with a distinct enough moveset that picking a main actually means something. Combat itself is shallower than the inspiration suggests. Attacks come out clean, the turtles move with genuine weight, but the defensive options are thin and matches tend to settle into trading rather than genuine spacing.

On PS2 the presentation takes the hit you would expect from a late-cycle multiplatform job. Textures are flat, arenas lose detail, and the frame rate wobbles when four characters and a stage event occupy the same space. The single-player side is thin, a short run of fights with a loose story frame rather than anything substantial, which leaves the game resting almost entirely on local multiplayer.

As a competitive fighter it never had the depth to hold anyone past a few evenings. As a couch game for people who know who Karai is, it works fine, and it remains one of the very few attempts to put the Turtles into a format other than side-scrolling beat 'em up. The franchise went back to brawling soon after, which tells you how far the experiment got.