theoretically this could be one of the best tmnt beatemups out there, its filled to the brim with so much love, and so many characters each with their own moveset, stats and everything (unbalanced, sure, but its fun and cool so why the hell not) and is very ambitious for a free fangame, but unfortunately it does have one drawback. the lives system.
now, early beatemups had lives of course. 90s games, they could be tough. but they also had continues, and coin-op games allowed you to just keep wasting quarters when they put instant kill pitfalls or cheap bosses everywhere. hell, the console version of turtles in time let you continue infinitely, restarting you at the begining of the level with 3 lives
now, this game does technically let you "continue" but it sends you outside the level with just one life. and yes it is TECHNICALLY doable with one life, i'm no expert. i can maybe make it to the second boss of the level without dying if im lucky, but halfway through that fight, i will die and it is disheartening to game over, continue with one life, rinse, repeat until you just want to restart entirely, conserving your lives and duplicating saves when necessary (auto saves are fine for a retro throwback fangame but continues arent i guess...)
and let me tell you, before restarting, i tried everything to cheat or manipulate my saves, but sadly no save editor i found could help me. so i bit the bullet and decided to restart. and upon restart i was greeted by... an unskippable tutorial. the annoying kind, you know the one. the kind that makes anyone impatient as i am feel like theyre held up at gunpoint. the kind that literally starts off by teaching you how to walk forward, and goes through every action possible in the game all while doing it as slow as possible and restricting any action at all while the instructions are being told. the kind where even if it doesnt take THAT long, its enough to drive a man mad... i dont get why its even there, considering its a fangame, a love letter to the arcade games of the 80s and 90s... like not only is it simple, but if you know about this game at all, you know how to play these types of games... and making it forced, even on replay, just feels condescending, and insulting even.


don't let my gripes ruin this game outright for you though. it's free, it doesn't deserve the 3-star rating i gave it. if it had 3-life continues, this could easily be a 5 star game. it has so much love and care and detail put into it, it's fun as fuck, and your favorite character from the cartoon or classic toyline is playable. the amount of playable characters cannot be understated and theyre all fun. please at least give this game a shot, i just wish it was as fair as turtles in time was.
and while im at it, let me replay levels dammit

A great expansion for an amazing game. It's got a lot of amazing designs, world exploration, new things to do etc.

I do find a lot of the new bosses are built heavily around doing 9000000 combo attacks then gaining half a maps worth of distance from you, right into another 90000 attacks. It kinda punishes any build that isnt DEX or INT which felt unfair at times.

The Scadu system is also very....not good. If you're struggling you need to go find more because this dlc relies heavily on you using them to your advantage.

I still enjoyed my time with the DLC but it felt much weaker than the base game. I'm not too worried about it being too difficult or anything because that's usually the case with FROM DLCs. However some bosses do feel really cheap and nasty at times.

But yeah...still pretty damn good.

i wish i could love this game more. i wish i could give it the full 5 stars, really. sadly, i'm being a bit generous by even giving it a 3 and a half. i adore platinum, tmnt is one of my favorite things, especially the comics, and we desperately needed a modern 3d tmnt beatemup that could be as memorable and beloved as the classic games. and truthfully, there is a lot about this game that COULD have made this the best tmnt out there. not "one of", THE.
but sadly this was during the era where platinum was activision's bitch, so this game... it was never going to meet its potential. but, on to the game itself.

being a platinum game, its pretty much a character action title. a hack n slash, stylish action, whatever you wanna call it. it's a 3d combat game based on combos, score, dodging, and looking cool as hell. and for what its worth, it does control well, running can be pretty slow, but besides that it does feel good to play. the combat, while simple, feels good enough to get the job done. and while other platinum games would force you to learn inputs to perform certain actions, this one... does the moba thing where its just abilities on cooldown... i'll get back to that.
the first level is actually this nice little sly cooper-esque mini open world filled with collectables that just activates my collectathon brain (i later found out i did not need to collect literally everything on the map because most of it is just items that go away after the mission, and the rest of comic covers by kevin eastman that dont really serve a purpose beyond looking cool, but like google exists) and throughout the level, you're given these alerts about what the bad guys are doing and where they are so you can stop them. you can track where they are with your detective vision, and every time you replay the level you might get different objectives, from beating enemies, to moving something from A to B, to collecting all the things the enemies had, to disarming bombs, its just nice to have that bit of variety. eventually when you've done enough, the game will give you its boss of the level. in the first level, the boss is bebop, but the game also has a random chance to spawn in a secret boss halfway through the fight, in this level it's rocksteady. but odds are you wont encounter any secret bosses first try, its just luck from what i gather. so, fighting bebop, you're going to spam all your moves, swap, spam, swap, spam, swap, spam... and then youre going to notice... all your moves are on cooldown, and you got most of bebops health bar, yeah... and then you notice he has SEVEN. so you have no option but to do little plicks of damage with your basic attack as you dodge and dodge and dodge. your moves will recharge and then, when you eventually get the boss down to just 2 bars, he starts glowing red and starts going into instant kill full frenzy mode and can team wipe you before you realize what happened... and when you die, and you will. maybe not this boss, but one of them, you'll use up one of your LIVES, like this is a damn arcade game. and then you'll notice... unlike arcades, you dont continue where you died. nope, you gotta go through ALLLLLL of that again. not the entire level, thank god, but the boss. and any items you used fighting don't refill. and the bosses, they only get harder, of course. it straight up seems undoable in single player, ai companions can be suicidal at times and will just dive into instant kill attacks. i could deal with it though, all if just the turtles dealt more damage.
once you're done with that fight though, you get a much more linear and straghtforward level... in the sewers of course. you still get some variety, but it it doesnt stop the repetition or just how boring some of the sewers can be. and then thats kinda it, pretty much every level goes that way.
you can make the bosses a tad less frustration however. between missions, you can upgrade your character, or an equipable tag that can have different effects, as well as upgrade them, and you can also unlock new tags and even new abilities, and upgrade the ones you do have.
unfortunately it does little to mitigate the necessity of co-op in this game... and with this game being delisted and the co-op no longer working, it. and theres no mod to increase the damage to opponents
honest to god theres a lot fun here and at times i loved it, i really did, but its held back by too much.