Back when I was in the fifth grade, having the latest Ninja Turtles stuff made you the cool kid at school, and if by "stuff" it meant the newest videogame, you were a god. Nowadays, TMNT appeals to a niche market, and while the toys are still cool, the videogames are atrocious. Konami's TMNT 2: Battle Nexus for Nintendo's GBA is a side- scrolling adventure that reminded me of the arcade games from years back, and when I say that I mean it reminded me of how great they were, because this game is pretty bad and best left in the bargain bin.

In their latest adventure, the turtles find themselves on a mysterious alien planet. Helping a scientist on the run, our heroes must slice and dice numerous enemies including some old favorites to save the day and return back to Earth. The game lets you play as Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, and/or Raphael, and each of them use their signature weapons but not right away, for you see, before many of the game's stages begin you lose them and have to trudge through the mini levels on a scavenger hunt to locate them, and when you do, you're usually already three quarters of the way through and you move on, only to lose your weapons again upon the beginning of the next stage. What you need to do in between is hide in the shadows so guards don't see you and climb up poles. You'll also need to locate security keys to open doors, and finding them requires a little bit of back tracking. The weapons that you do start out with (throwing stars) are so weak that you can never engage the enemy head-to-head, so Konami has effectively taken out what made the old TMNT games fun (just going from left to right destroying everything that moves) and turned the game into a boring stealth adventure that provides very little action. The game does make up for this later on when you get to use your weapons a bit more, and there are cool vehicle stages where you ride a space-ship, an air car, and a Muta-board, but it never gets over its awful first impression. Plus, there are crystal shards you need to collect to unlock stages, and some of them can only be reached using a specific turtle, so you need to revisit the same stages to get them, making things even more repetitive.

To be fair, the game's not a lost cause. Its graphics are colorful and detailed, and the environments are nicely varied. The bosses are absolutely huge, and as I said before, the vehicle segments are actually enjoyable. The game's cut scenes are still shots, but even they are well done, and some voice samples accompany them and those too were well-executed. However, the game's story is pretty forgettable, and it's fleshed out a little too much during some of the game's scenes, so I found myself scrolling through more text than I wanted to read.

In addition to the game's single-player campaign (which will take a little while to complete since there are 30+ stages), Battle Nexus includes a multiplayer option for up to four. You can race one another in the game's aptly named Race Mode, or see who can collect the most crystals in Battle Mode. Both offer some cheap thrills and lots of stages, and are good enough to extend the game's replay value. Unfortunately, you'll need a copy of the game for each player.

I would appreciate Konami's efforts a bit more if they were releasing good games, but such is not the case with Battle Nexus. It's almost like they don't remember how much fun the older games were, and therefore have nothing to compare these newer titles to. At this point, it would be wise to just port the SNES game Turtles in Time and recoup some lost respect. As for Battle Nexus, leave it on the shelf. If there were such a thing as secret ooze, I'd pour it all over the cartridge in the hopes that it'd make it a better game.

Our Final ScoreBad

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