The first videogame appearance of our favourite heroes in a half-shell could certainly be called very ambitious. On paper, it all sounds fantastic. All four Ninja Turtles are playable and can even be swapped at any time via the menu. So you can switch directly to Donatello if you need his long-raged Bō or if a Turtle is almost out of HP to prevent capture. Each member of the turtle gang has its own health pool. In addition to the actual side-scroll levels, there are 5 overworld maps, which are quite straightforward at the beginning but become more open later on. On these, you can run around or ride the Party Wagon through New York. This gives the whole game a feeling of a bigger scale in which we enter different houses and sewers. The actual levels consist of dodging the many enemy types, of course also defeating them and jumping sections with a few powerups consisting of optional weapons such as shuriken. So we fight, drive, swim and jump through the levels to put an end to the evil Shredder. Doesn't sound bad at all, does it? I mean the game also looks great for an NES game. Wrong. The game is weak in many areas. The overworld map later becomes a time-consuming trial and error of which houses have to be entered to get the items needed to progress. The menu only shows you where the locations are, which you can enter and a short info from April or Master Splinter about what is needed. Since enemies respawn all the time, every spot that doesn't bring progress is a waste of time and probably also HP. The enemies, especially in the last third of the game, are simply horrible. Sometimes they spawn right in front of you and need several hits to defeat them, which leads to an inevitable hit on us. In some places, you have to jump over a hole or spikes only to be surprised in mid-jump by an enemy that suddenly spawns into the visible screen. This usually not only causes you to lose HP but also to be pushed into a pit or spikes. Often those sections feel like you require prior knowledge of the stages. Something that is not uncommon with arcade machines and their usually very high difficulty in order to pull as many quarters as possible out of the teens' pockets. But here we have a home console game. In all these moments, even when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) throws 5 enemies at you at once, the game never feels difficult but cheap. The fact that the jumping of the four boys is super wobbly doesn't make the aforementioned jumping passages (often over bodies of water or spikes) any easier. The bosses are also semi-well-designed. Most of them have projectiles and run towards us, which is difficult to dodge depending on the stage. But especially the last boss, who is stunned by our blows, I defeated on the first try without him having a chance to hit back. What? This game could really have used a lot more polish and a lot more fairness. At the end of my almost 2 hours, I have to say that I rarely had any real fun. Instead, swearing was the order of the day and exclamations such as "How was I supposed to know?", "Of course, he spawned right in my face!" and "What were they thinking!" were not uncommon. And don't even get me started on the underwater level. Better put the game aside and play Turtles in Time, which is worlds better.