Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Impressions

We had a chance to check out a brief presentation of Konami's new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game at E3. Not surprisingly, the development team working on the game revisited many of the older Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle games, including those that were released in arcades and on the SNES, in attempt to determine what made those games so fun and implement similar features in the latest game. The end result is a full-3D cel-shaded action game that essentially plays the same as the older Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle arcade games.

Of course, each of the four turtles has his own unique weapons, which factors into the gameplay. For example, Donatello has the longest reach of the group, while Michelangelo can glide through the air by twirling his nunchacku. Meanwhile, Raphael is the strongest character of the group, while Leonardo appears to have the fastest attacks with his dual katanas. Each turtle can perform 10 different motion-captured attacks, which is pretty interesting, since there are only two attack buttons (strong and weak) and a jump button. When you're in the game with another player, you can string together combinations to do even more damage.

The six stages in the game have been divided into different sections, and there will be 35 areas in all. Various characters from the new cartoon will be making appearances in the game as boss characters and regular enemies as well. The versus mode will let you play as the turtles and the boss characters once you've beaten them in the main portion of the game.

Visually, the game looks quite impressive and does an excellent job of re-creating the look of the cartoon. While the environments look a little sparse at the moment, all of the character models are vibrant and some of the boss characters are absolutely enormous. There really didn't seem to be any substantial framerate problems either.

We'll have more details on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles soon.