I think Konami is trying to steal money from children. The last two Turtle games, based on the new Saturday morning cartoon series, were straightforward masher-style beat-‘em-ups. They were mediocre, but at least they vaguely resembled the quarter-munching TMNT arcade games of old. With Mutant Melee, Konami has opted keep the simplistic brawler mechanics of those games, but ditch the actual action structure. The result is a hollow, monotonous multiplayer fighting game.
Melee plays like a poor man’s Power Stone 2. The premise is similar: four players fight each other simultaneously, either in teams or in a free-for-all, in interactive, scrolling environments littered with power-ups and breakables. It’s not a bad set-up, but I’ve yet to play a game that really makes great use of it. Mutant Melee is no exception.
Core play breaks down as such: the A Button is the primary attack while the B Button acts as a secondary attack. Combos are achieved by alternating between the two, in perfect sequence or otherwise. The different strings are all pretty cookie-cutter. Some of them look kind of neat and they do differ slightly in effect, but not radically so. Hitting A rapidly – with the occasional B for good measure – constitutes the meat of offense in Melee. It’s pretty much all that’s required, although there are some more options - jumping, throwing, blocking and using special attacks, to be specific - but none of these moves raise the core mechanics above the level of a simple masher.
There’s some minor depth, I suppose, in that a throw will break a block, a block will stop an attack, and attackers can’t be thrown, but the game is mostly just about pressing buttons and moving in the general direction of your opponents. If there is more nuance to it, it probably isn’t worth exploring because, despite the license, the game doesn't have much personality. There are tacked-on, half-hearted one-liners, but the combat lacks verve and the animations are all rigid and plain.
The stages are similarly lifeless. They're small, with areas you'd think you'd be able to reach but can't, and sparse, with nothing much going on save for a few crates and drums littered about here and there. The containers can be thrown or broken to reveal items or power-ups. The items are a little lame (Leonardo can pick up a sword and use it instead of, you know, his swords) and the power-ups, though effective, don‘t really add any depth or entertainment value.
Even the game’s multiplayer mode, Melee Match, is dull. Up to four people can fight in a few different match types, like the standard melee match or King of the Hill, with configurable parameters like match length and various victory conditions. King of the Hill in Mutant Melee is one of the most contemptible match types I’ve ever seen in any game. In it, players get points for staying inside a cylindrical beacon of light that occasionally shifts location in a stage. Since there’s no other goal aside from staying in the beacon’s radius, matches devolve into ‘kids-playing-soccer,’ with everyone button mashing at each other to retain a dominant position in a small area. It’s a little funny to see at first, but there’s not a lot of amusement beyond the initial novelty.
The other mode, Adventure Story, is, unfortunately, just a string of single-player melee matches with more specialized conditions. Players can pick any of the four Turtles initially and then unlock additional characters with progress, but the different adventures only deviate slightly from one another. Fights are usually just a matter of knocking out a certain number of enemies within a given time limit and some of the matches can actually be frustrating as they call for dealing with multiple foes capable of spazzing out attacks at an alarming rate. Worse, match conditions like “knock out your enemies within X seconds” or “score more KOs than your opponents” are tagged on almost arbitrarily. The time limit condition seems particularly senseless, as both the player’s health and the enemies’ health are readjusted to fit the condition of each match. So, if you’re expected to take out a lot of enemies in a short time, their health will be limited; and if you’re supposed to fight fewer enemies in a longer time, everyone’s vitality will be greater. That’s a pretty cheap way to offer balance, I should think. There is also the occasional bonus game, like throwing bombs off a building or breaking target dummies, but they aren’t fun either. The old side scrolling days are sorely missed.
Really, the adventure mode appears to be an afterthought. Most telling are the various characters’ voice samples, which were lifted, inappropriately, from the melee mode. A KO in Melee Match counts as one point, so when characters get knocked out in that mode they’ll say something to the effect of “What’s one point? Before you know it, we’re all gonna have one point!” That’s all fine and dandy in the proper context, but the same voice samples are used in the adventure mode where most matches only allow one KO. So, after I would get beat by the Shredder, Donatello would chide him with “good for you, but let’s see you get two more” or “you think you have the advantage, but you’re now at a statistical disadvantage,” followed quickly by the game over screen. All the characters react in much the same way, with Casey Jones’ “big deal, you need two more points to win” or April O’Neal’s “I think I’m going to surprise everyone with a win” as she goes unconscious. Luckily, the game over screen was always ready with practical advice for me: after losing one of Shredder’s matches against Leonardo and Michelangelo, the game dropped some sage-like wisdom on me by exclaiming, “… you must defeat Raphael!”
Also, for some reason, certain enemy energy bars don’t seem to display properly in this mode. I haven’t really made sense of it yet, but it seems that when fighting more than three opponents there isn’t enough room to display all of the enemy energy bars, so instead of displaying the remaining enemies’ vitality gauges after their comrades have been KO’d, the game just doesn’t bother showing them at all. As a result, I more than once found myself fighting three opponents with only two of their energy bars on the screen. It doesn’t make much of a difference in a game of this nature, but it does make Adventure Story feel all the more hacked together.
Some people might be motivated to slog through the mode for tokens, which can unlock bonus content in Melee’s library, but this would prove folly. For example, after fighting a few tedious story matches, I spent my hard-earned tokens on a picture of one of the stages I fought on. I also bought a snapshot of a car I saw drive by. That’s right: a picture of a car featured in a stage from the hit videogame Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Melee!
The bulk of the extras were similarly disappointing. You can unlock “outtakes,” like pictures of the Turtles watching a T.V. with a Konami logo on it (weak) or you could peruse the “other media” section which, oddly enough, contains actual outtakes. The only decent bit in the whole lot is the comic section, which contains a scanned copy of the original first issue of Ninja Turtles. I’d never read it before or even seen the artwork, so I thought it was a pretty neat addition, if even the viewer wasn’t so hot.
Overall: 2.5/10
One solitary keen little extra aside, the game is lousy. The whole thing feels like an extra mode that was tacked-on last minute to add the illusion of substance to a normal, second-rate Turtles game. I know I must have played a lot of bad Ninja Turtles games as a kid, but I’m certain they were all more entertaining than Mutant Melee.
