Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled is the 2009 remake of a 1991 arcade game, and the distinction matters more than it usually would. The source material and the remake are not the same thing, and the license that let both exist is gone.
April O’Neil at Liberty Island
The game opens with the turtles watching a television newscast. April O’Neil is reporting from Liberty Island. Krang flies in using his giant exosuit and steals the Statue of Liberty outright.
Shredder then hijacks the airwaves to laugh at the turtles. It is a small scene, and it does the work a hundred lines of exposition could not.
The turtles head to downtown New York and pursue the Foot Clan through the streets and the city sewers. There, Shredder sends them through a time warp. From that point the game is a chase across multiple eras, with Shredder’s army waiting in each one.
Ubisoft Singapore and the 2009 Remake
Turtles in Time Re-Shelled is an enhanced remake of the 1991 arcade game Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, which itself is a sequel to the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game. Both of those cabinets came from Konami.
The version under review here is the 2009 Re-Shelled remake. Ubisoft Singapore developed and published it for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
It arrived worldwide on August 5, 2009 on Xbox Live Arcade and September 10, 2009 on the PlayStation Network. The game was later delisted from the Xbox Live Marketplace and the PlayStation Store in June 2011, due to an expired license.
Streets, Sewers, and the Time Warp
The structure is a side-scrolling beat ’em up with a side view. Modes are single player and co-operative. The source material for its look and tone is a mix:
- the 1987 animated series
- the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures
- the second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie
That is an unusually broad pull for a licensed brawler. The themes are action, science fiction and comedy, and the genre is hack and slash crossed with beat ’em up.
What the Turtles Actually Do
The loop is simple and it does not pretend otherwise. Walk right, hit Foot soldiers, reach the end of the stage, repeat. The time warp gives that loop its shape, sending the turtles through multiple eras to fight Shredder’s army before they can reach him.
Two players in the same side-scrolling corridor turns a routine brawl into a running argument about who took the last hit.
The Verdict on Turtles in Time Re-Shelled
Here is the ranking that matters, from the thing this game does best to the thing it does least well:
- The opening — Krang, the Statue of Liberty, Shredder on the airwaves.
- The time warp structure, which keeps the side-scrolling from going stale.
- The combat itself, which is competent and rarely more than that.
The published critical score is 8.2 out of 10 on IMDb. That is the figure the source gives, and the source gives no explanation of what it measures or why it was awarded.
What the source does establish is the game’s commercial life. The 1991 arcade original was produced by Konami, and the 2009 Re-Shelled remake came from Ubisoft Singapore. The license that let both exist expired, and in June 2011 the 2009 Re-Shelled remake left the Xbox Live Marketplace and the PlayStation Store.
That is the real story here. A licensed brawler is a rental on someone else’s property, and this one ended when the rental did.
The delisting is not a footnote to this review. It is the fact that should shape how anyone thinks about the game now. Everything else — the newscast, the exosuit, the time warp, the co-op — survives only in memory, on old hardware, or through means the publisher never sanctioned.
The 8.2 is a published figure and nothing more. Treat it as a number the source handed over, not a verdict this paper is endorsing.
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