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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up E3 Hands-On

We show Leonardo who's boss in this frantic fighting game.

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There are two things we know about turtles: They love pizza and fighting. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash-Up doesn't show off their divine culinary taste, but it does have lots of angry turtles demonstrating why they are considered elite ninja warriors. We had a chance to do battle with the green gang today and came away with a taste for turtle blood and no further way to satisfy it.

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There were seven selectable characters in the demo today. You have the four main turtles--Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo--along with the talking rat Master Splinter, their nemesis Shredder, and news reporter April O'Neil. With no story to provide some context, we can only imagine why April would join the fray against six trained killers. Although we never found out her true motive, when she wins, the words "Even the prettiest rose has thorns" scroll across the screen--poetic and true.

The fighting action is reminiscent of Smash Bros, which makes sense because some of the people who made last year's Smash Bros Brawl are working on this game as well. The four-player fights are chaotic but rely on only three buttons to get results. Two buttons are used to attack, you can combine them to throw, and a separate button blocks. You can still pull off fancy-looking moves, though, and long combos. As April, we swung around a sword like a trained fighter, slicing and dicing through turtle skin like it was paper.

Unlike Smash Bros, you have a real health bar in TMNT. We fought in a sewer level that was walled in, so there was no way to bash someone into the horizon anyway. When we lost our health, we died, though we had a few lives to burn through before we were eliminated from the match. There are also dynamic obstacles in each level that you have to be wary of. In the sewer level, you can bash open a pipe, causing a flood that sends the battle to a new area. In that area, you have to watch out for an alligator that will quickly kill anyone slow enough to be caught in its maw.

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TMNT isn't at the same level as Smash Bros at this point, but there is still time for it to shape up before it comes out later this year.

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