Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Arcade)

Konami’s licensed brawlers are some of the best of their kind, their four player cabinets always a big draw in any arcade that has them. Before they could get to the likes of The Simpsons and X-Men though, they would enter the genre with an adaptation of the hot cartoon property Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This was the game that no doubt showed other licensees the potential their franchise had in Konami’s hands, but being the first also meant that they didn’t yet have the experience to truly explore the potential of a beat ’em up game. The heroes in a half-shell were the proving grounds that helped Konami grow, and with that came the ups and downs of such importance.

The 1989 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game offers all four of the main mutated teenage turtles as playable characters, meaning four players can play simultaneously and work together in their battle against Shredder. Things kick off quickly when April is attacked by The Foot Clan, and while there isn’t much in the way of story besides heading to the next area the bad guys happen to be, things do escalate in a few ways like the rat mentor Splinter being captured in a later level and the boys eventually fighting their way to the deadly Technodrome base which means the alien Krang is working with Shredder on his plan to… just cause trouble it seems. April and Splinter are both rescued before the climax and no plan updates are given before the confrontation with the two final bosses. Stopping bad guys who are active and dangerous is probably motivation enough and a decent enough reason to move through the five levels on offer though, and they certainly have enough active and dangerous foot soldiers to justify the continued aggression on the part of the turtles.

The four turtles all play somewhat differently but not to a degree where it feels like anyone is being shafted if they have to pick a certain turtle. Leonardo’s swords and Donatello’s staff definitely give them a range advantage with their basic attacks, but Michelangelo’s nunchucks and Raphael’s sais are both thrust forward enough that they don’t feel like they have to get insanely close to do damage. Beyond the basic moves performed by the attack button, every turtle can throw regular enemies, something the game seems to trigger automatically as an attack follow up, the move helpful when it crops up but not reliable since it isn’t totally under your control. Jump kicks can be performed by pressing the jump and attack button either one after the other or simultaneously for a more powerful version that can kill the regular grunt enemies almost instantly, although Rapheal is given a different attack for the button combination where he rolls forward and strikes instead. It’s not bad for being different since the basic jump kick input works all the same, but it is a little unusual since the other three aren’t given this extra love.

Outside of the regular attacks the turtles can sometimes come across objects laying around in the environment like traffic cones, street signs, and parking meters that can be hit with their weapons to fling them across the screen, the flying object usually taking out any enemies it hits. While these come up a lot in the early street levels, the game does pretty much abandon them as you enter the sewers, a factory, and the Technodrome, and while you still might find an explosive barrel to strike to clear away crowds, things change from helpful environmental objects to harmful ones. Spiked gates, lasers, and enemies driving cars or motorcycles can all hit you if you aren’t careful, but they’re more a punishment for being careless or an interesting way to get the enemies eliminated by having them fall for the traps instead. It’s not really enough to make the stages feel too different, especially with the multiple street levels, and the skateboarding segment really doesn’t change the play up much either besides making everyone move around the screen faster.

The similar level designs aren’t helped too much by the fact many of the villains are cut from the same cloth. Foot Soldiers make up the bulk of what you face, the robotic ninjas you face perhaps too populous for their own good. The purple hooded ones are very simple to defeat even when they’re given weapons like spears, sledgehamemrs, and throwing objects later down the line, and while the ones in white and yellow hoods are a bit tougher, they don’t really escalate the danger too much. They’ll eventually get guns that have a huge range advantage over you if you don’t deal with them quickly, but most foot soldiers appear in small groups that are easily handled no matter how many players are playing. A level on the highway that expands the tilted play field even wider seems to appropriately increase their numbers so you can get overwhelmed and thus you need to deal with them more carefully, but then things dial back a little for the following stages. Numbers and appearing suddenly are their advantages and there are enough moments where it does keep you active and moving around, but their abundance is definitely one of the weaker parts of the game, the constant wave of similar enemies starting to grow a little stale.

Luckily, the Foot Soldiers aren’t totally alone. Waist-high robots known as Mousers start appearing that try and chomp down on the turtles, coming in great numbers whenever they appear unless you are quick to get to their entry point and kill them as they come in. Unicycle robots known as Roadkill Rodneys move around the battlefield at speeds that make them hard to pin and have long range electrical shocks to hit you with if you try to approach them head on. A few flying robots appear as do Foot Soldiers piloting flying machines, but these aren’t quite the proper injection of variety needed to really mix up the fighting since their speedy nature mainly means you jump and kick over and over and hope you’ll connect. One of the bosses actually features this as his gimmick and moves so quickly that you can’t really chase him, making him a slow boring battle since his only attack method is dropping Mousers you can easily dispatch. Other bosses do fare better though even if they’re still mostly simple. The anthropomorphic warthog Bebop and humanoid rhino Rocksteady are early bosses who mostly charge, punch, and fire their weapons in a way that’s easy to learn and avoid, the game having no qualms setting up a rematch with them simultaneously with no adjustments to their health. Their design of close range strikes and long range weapons carries over to most of the bosses, the idea being you have to get away after landing your strikes to dodge the melee attacks. For the most part this is a plain but effective boss formula that receives only minor alterations based on the boss, but Shredder adds an interesting twist to it by both having the most effective attacks of both types while also creating an identical clone to distract you and make the fight harder to just slip into an effective attack pattern. The good news is that these minor alterations and small change ups do prevent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from becoming too repetitive, but none of them go far enough or ask enough from the player to really grow out of the basic satisfaction of just mindlessly pounding whatever foe happened to walk on screen.

THE VERDICT: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a prototypical beat ’em up game, and that’s okay. The four turtles have enough enemies put in front of them for a short action-filled experience, and while the Foot Clan could do with sending in a greater variety of enemies, the foes are serviceable for mindless brawler carnage. The bosses ask for a bit more but aren’t the kind of highlight you’d hope to find breaking up the action, and the small shakeups just stave off boredom instead of elevating the game into something more exciting. Everything is fine, functional, and easy to pick up, but this is basically the turtles slotted into the brawler genre baseline instead of facing some unique mechanics or foes.

And so, I give Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for arcade machines…

An OKAY rating. Essentially a Konami licensed brawler blueprint before their special brand of creativity is added to the action, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles definitely feels like the first out of the gate for them in that it’s pretty much carrying over what other beat ’em ups of the time did. You use simple attacks to handle waves of simple foes, a few special enemy types and hazards appearing to make sure it doesn’t all blur together into constant Foot Clan fights but things still never escalate in a way where the player really needs to change their tactics or learn much about the opposition. Bosses can change that up a little in a good way but flying foes conversely just waste your time with their required tactical shift, so things end up averaging back to a pretty plain beat ’em up that doesn’t mess up a lot but also feels too comfortable in its formulaic design.

There are definitely some nice touches to make fans happy like parts of the show’s theme tune, pizza health pick-ups that are thematically appropriate, and some nice still shots evoking the show’s cartoon style that pair well with the voice clips, but this certainly wasn’t Konami at its best. However, touches like that and a decent enough design to please arcade goers looking for quick fun opened the door to bigger and better opportunities, and Konami would even return to the turtles later down the line with the superior Turtles in Time. Their first go with the franchise still isn’t bad, but it’s practically a textbook example of the simplistic designs brawlers often fall into. If not for the few attempts to alter the gameplay loop it might have been so plain it would be bad, but instead, this is an acceptable enough beat ’em up that opened the door for much better things to follow.