"Turtle Power" just doesn't cut it this time.
Gameplay wise, Smash Up plays similar to Smash Brothers, with one big difference. Unlike Brawl, Smash Up utilizes health bars, rather than damage percentages. The game's stages reflect this, as there are less pits and more hazards that will drain your health.
Let's start off with the single player. You have your choice of Practice, Adventure(which is really just an Arcade Mode with cutscenes), Mission Mode or Survival. There's also Battle Royale, but, since that can be played with multiple players, I'm considering that multiplayer. Practice Mode is exactly what you'd expect, no faults there. Just a training dummy, unlimited time, and unlimited health. No complaints there. But Adventure Mode is where you really begin to notice some faults.
Adventure Mode is presented through 3 cutscenes, not including the ending for your character of choice. The main fault here is that you cannot play as any character you wish. You are limited to the four turtles, April, Casey Jones, and Splinter. No matter who you have unlocked, you're stuck with these guys. Adventure Mode is also cripplingly short. You fight maybe 8 or 9 matches overall, and then it's over and you select a prize. Prizes include extra shells, which serve as a currency of sorts, or 4 new unlockable characters. While you can only unlock 4 characters through Adventure, there are still a few more to be unlocked by other means. Beating Adventure Mode with one of the 6 characters available for use in it unlocks an alt. costume for said character, although most of them are fairly unimpressive or flat out awful in design. And example of this is Raphael's, who's alt. costume is him sporting a red mohawk, goth clothing, and a guitar strapped to his back. Cutscenes in Adventure Mode are terrible. They're presented as motion comics, and the artwork is just bad. April and Karai have strange, almost distorted cartoon-ish faces, and the turtles all look like doodles, rather than full drawings. Splinter and Shredder, however, look fairly decent.
Mission Mode is a series of 51 Missions, which can be played to unlock shells, new characters, or new stages. Some of these missions are genuinely fun to play, while others are just plain frustrating. Changing difficulty in these missions seldom seems to matter, as well. Aside from this, there isn't much more to say about it. However, I do admit that Mission Mode is one of the high points of the game.
Survival Mode has you pick any character you wish, and fight enemy after enemy until you reach 100 KOs. Enemies are severely weakened, and I must admit, it is pretty fun to knock down enemy after enemy. With each KO, the next opponent will be a little bit harder. This mode would be very challenging...if it weren't for the wall jump. Using the wall jump attack, which is performed by jumping into a wall and pressing A, will severely damage the CPU to the point of near death on mostly every enemy. The worst of all? Most of the times, the CPU doesn't even make an effort to dodge it. Survival Mode would be perfect, if it weren't for the lousy AI.
Now on to Multiplayer. As with any fighting game, you can have a typical match, and, like Smash Brothers, you can turn certain in-game items on or off, change the mode to lives/stock, timed, KO fest, etc. Most of these game modes play very similar to Brawl, with little to no differences. Battle Royale is pretty fun with friends, and can be fun in short bursts alone as well. However, this mode suffers greatly with the inability to add CPUs to a fight online. While it may seem like a minor nitpick, some of my fondest memories in Brawl are fighting both friends and CPUs in an all-out brawl, no pun intended.
Perhaps one of the better aspects of multiplayer is the co-op Survival mode. This plays exactly like the typical survival, only CPUs make a bit more of an effort to attack you. The co-op aspect here plays as a tag-team, with the ability to tag in or out of the battle. I've had some of my best moments with this game in this mode.
What the game truly lacks in, however, is content. The total roster includes only 12 characters from the franchise, including Shredder, Foot Ninja, Karai, Fugitoud, and an Utrom(not Krang). The entire roster as a whole has only 15 total characters, with three separate Rabbids in as guest characters. The game feels unfinished. Some modes lack polish, and the roster as a whole feels incomplete. Where's Leatherhead? Bebop? Rocksteady? Hell, what about Baxter Stockman? A Turtle fighting game can be a wonderful thing, but this isn't that wonderful thing we were hoping for. As a whole, Smash Up just feels like a game that was forced to scrap multiple concepts in order to make a street date, and it suffers greatly because of this. While the multiplayer is fairly entertaining if you have other friends who are fans of the Turtles, you won't find yourself playing the single player very much. This game could've been so much more, but it just lacks so much. If you're truly interested, get this game used at a low price.
The Pros: Graphics are pretty good by Wii standards, Each character feels different in playstyle, Environmental hazards are fun and welcomed, Voice acting is top-notch, Brawl-esque gameplay
The Cons: Severely lacking content, Small roster, Ugly cutscenes, Characters get up and turn around way too slow, Cripplingly small roster, Fails to include many familiar faces, Single Player is bland and unimpressive