'Reshelled' not worth your time
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Last year’s Summer of Arcade promotion was nothing short of amazing. Five weeks of high profile Xbox Live Arcade game releases, and every one of the games was a fun title in its own right. Three weeks into this year’s Summer of Arcade -- well, it’s not looking quite as good.
This week’s game is “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle: Turtles in Time Reshelled”, a remake of a popular arcade/Super Nintendo game. Perennial turtle foes Shredder and Krang have stolen the Statue of Liberty, and it’s up to our reptilian heroes to track them down through time and space. Which, of course, boils down to you walking from left to right through nine stages, beating up everyone you come across.
It’s a simple formula, and one that has stood the test of time. Side-scrolling beat-‘em-up games are defined more by what they add to this formula than anything else. That’s where the first of “Reshelled’s” problems appear because it really doesn’t add anything. You have a basic attack, a longer basic attack and a jumping attack. That is the extent of what you can do throughout the entire game.
There’s very little actual variety to the enemies, and the only difference between an enemy with a sword and an enemy with a rocket launcher is that you probably want to take down the rocket launcher guy first.
The game’s biggest problem, though, is one of context. It doesn’t work at all as a modern game. It fails that as soon as anyone realizes that “Castle Crashers” is the exact same price and the exact same type of game, but infinitely more fun.
But it also doesn’t work as a remake. Without the limited lives of the arcade game and with the annoyingly small margin of error for hitting enemies provided by the game’s switch to 3-D, “Reshelled” is too hard moment-to-moment and way too easy in the long run. Winning easily despite a lack of really feeling in control is about the worst thing that can ever happen to a game, especially one as simple as this.
“Reshelled” isn’t exactly a terrible game, just an unnecessary one. You can have fun with it, particularly in four-player co-op on the hardest difficulty, but you can have more fun with the original version or with any of its modern equivalents. The $15 price tag takes it from unnecessary to absurd.
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