TMNT

There is no failure state worth the name. Miss a jump off a Manhattan water tower and the camera calmly picks you up and sets you back on the ledge, no lives lost, no reload. Ubisoft Montreal built the 2007 Turtles tie-in around that decision, and it explains almost everything else about how the game feels: it wants you moving fast and looking cool, and it removes anything that might interrupt that.

What's left is a traversal game with light combat attached. Each Turtle carries a specialty — Donatello vaults on his bo, Michelangelo glides on nunchaku, Raphael claws up sheer walls, Leonardo covers ground — and levels are strung together from wall runs, pole swings and rail slides that chain if you keep the timing loose. The Prince of Persia influence is unmistakable, right down to the rhythm of the wall-to-wall bounce, though the analogue precision has been sanded away in favour of forgiveness. Combat is a modest two-button affair, thinned out further by the fact that enemies rarely threaten anything. The best of it comes from the paired Turtle moves, where a partner boosts you across a gap or you take down a Foot soldier together in a single canned flourish.

It follows the CGI film's plot, which means the mythical-beast subplot, an estranged Leonardo and Raphael in the Nightwatcher suit, all delivered in short cutscenes that assume you have seen the picture. The PS2 build is the compromised one: the film's stylised shapes survive, but the lighting flattens, the New York skyline draws in close, and the frame rate wobbles when too much geometry crowds a rooftop chase.

The honest verdict at the time was that it ended too soon and asked too little. Both remain true. Yet as a piece of licensed design it is unusually clear-headed about its audience — a kids' film adaptation that decided frustration was the enemy and built a game a nine-year-old could finish over a weekend without help. What it does with its cities is the part that lasts. There are stretches, particularly the nighttime rooftop runs, where the momentum locks in and four ninja turtles crossing a skyline stops being a licence and becomes a rhythm.

A better game would have trusted you with the risk of falling. This one just wanted you to enjoy the height.