Half-Shell Blunder
Arcade Attack is a disgustingly misguided attempt to reclaim the old-school TMNT game magic. This farce of a game seems to have been developed using just a checklist of tropes common to the arcade incarnations of yesteryear, but they forgot to make the thing actually worth playing.
From the moment you pick up the game, you're visually assaulted due to the cover by the way of some very poorly drawn Turtles with giant cheeks. Fortunately, the Turtles' visages do not reflect these incarnations, and are given old-school Mirage appearances in the cutscenes and a hodgepodge of the 2003 designs for the actual game. Despite the improvement over the cover Turtles, these much better Turtles do not blend well and the contrast is noticeable.
The plot is simplistic, but if one is familiar with the lore upon which it is based, it's a bit confusing. Cyber Shredder apparently is sending Foot Soldiers from the future to attack... for some reason. It's never really explained how and why this is going on, and despite all of the villains having their designs from the final "Back to the Sewers" season, there really is nothing that says when this takes place - either after, or instead of, that season. Is it at all canon to the series, or some sort of quasi-canon? Who knows. But then again, it's a brawler, so I'm very much overthinking us. Still, it's a bit baffling as to why Cyber Shredder, who was thought to have perished in "Wedding Bells and Bytes", is alive and well in the distant future.
So okay, character design and story aside, how does this thing play? Not well at all, I'm afraid. Starting off with the obvious, the controls are configured in a way that can only serve to frustrate and are NOT customizable in any way at all. Why the heck is Y jump? Why is it so tough to grab and throw enemies/objects? Why is attack response so sluggish? These are things that should have been addressed rather than worrying about the "old school" features the game's advertisement so heavily touted, such throwing enemies at the camera and multi-colored Foot Soldiers.
Even with good controls, though, nothing could ever make the tedious trudging through the bland, poorly structured levels in a painful isometric view, at all something worth doing. The graphics also don't help this effort, as despite being two-dimensional, everything's rendered in eye-raping 3D, as very few companies seemed to grasp the DS's 3D capabilities to render anything other than sub-Saturn launch title visuals. The environments are also generic and bland, and lack that visual "pop" that makes them fun and exciting, as the TMNT games of the 90's did.
Overall, a bunch of major missteps keep Arcade Attack from not only delivering the arcade nostalgia Ubisoft had hoped for, but any semblance of entertainment at all.
