The scrolling beat’em genre hasn’t evolved much over the last 15 years. At least not as much as platformers or adventure games have. With this in mind it’s unsurprising to find that Turtles in Time: Re-Shelled feels rather retro, although this should be expected seeing it’s a re-make (or re-shelling) of Konami’s 1991 SNES brawler. A few extra special moves and attacks to bolster the limited move list wouldn’t have gone amiss but if Ubisoft had included these no doubt fans would complain that it isn’t true to the original.
The name of the game may seem misleading at first – the first three levels are set during the present time, but once these are cleared Shredder sends the Turtles tripping through time to the age of dinosaurs, a space station, a pirate ship and more. This may sound like an exciting premises but it’s still your typical scrolling left to right brawler with a boss battle at the end of each level. You’d think that the different time periods would allow for a large rooster of enemies but no – 90% of the foes you face are just foot soldiers with different weapons. They could have at least put novelty hats on them.
On the plus side the developers have done a good job bringing the game into the world of 3D – the characters are nicely styled, with lighting and shadow effects helping bring them to life, and the animation is fluid too. You can also play online with three other dudes and a few of the achievements are hard to get, such as defeating the last boss with only one life. Oddly, two of the achievements are gained for harming your Turtle – one for getting squished by a falling object and another for getting zapped by a laser.
The sad fact is that it’s a very short game with little replay value – unlike the Xbox Live Arcade version of the classic Turtles coin-op there are infinite continues which make it possible to see everything in well under an hour. If this were 400 points I’d be a bit more positive but with Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, Monkey Island: SE and numerous others also available for 800 points it’s a bit hard to recommend to anybody but fans of the heroes in a hard shell.
