I was totally not expecting this game to be a Metroidvania style game. First of all I had never heard of Radical Rescue and to be honest I didn't know the Game Boy had 3 TMNT games, I thought Fall of the Foot Clan was the only one. That aside, I only found it out through the Cowabunga Collection and it shows images of the game and I thought it was another side scroller brawler like the others, but the sprites were sized better. Nope, this is a TMNT Metroidvania and honestly it feels like TMNT (NES) done the right way.

I honestly really like the detailed sprites of all the characters including the turtles, it really doesn't look like it was reused from any of the past games, all the assets actually look brand new. The world is pretty open and there's health upgrades and stuff to find. It's not a deep Metroidvania by any means, but it's done quite well.

I'll admit I was a bit thrown off at the start of the game because you are forced to use Michelangelo due to everyone else being captured. My first thought was "Great..." until I jumped and pressed A again and found him spinning his nunchaku to slowly glide down to the ground. This! They got that from the cartoon intro and it's the reason he does it in future games! Honestly it was awesome to see. Each turtle has their own ability to help get through the areas, while none of them have any other difference of speed or power or anything besides Donatello having like an extra pixel of reach their difference lies in their newfound abilities.

The music is actually really good and again uses it's own songs only borrowing the main theme in spots, but everything else is brand new.

The difficulty sits somewhere between Fall of the Foot Clan and closer to the end hits like Castlevania levels of difficult, but all in all stays fun.

I highly suggest people play this game, it's very different and I think they were on to something, though it seems this was the last time they made this type of TMNT game, future ones would just be brawlers or regular side scrollers. Shame, this was amazing.

Reviewed on Dec 26, 2022


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