Couple the bad mechanics with some thoroughly bad character balancing-some characters, like Michelangelo, are incredibly easy to abuse, whereas others, like Donatello, are near worthless-and what you have is some downright unpleasant gameplay. The game attempts to break up the monotony of the fighting controls by throwing in a special move you can perform, but that doesn't help. Hit, hit, knockdown hit, hit, knockdown and so on. Konami's Hawaii studio has gone to the trouble of adding a couple of three-button combos for each character, but the action is still repetitive. The main problem is that the fighting mechanics feel like they're built entirely off the action from the TMNT beat-'em-up games. Instead, it ends up closer to something like Stake: Fortune Fighters, in terms of quality. Unlike the last two TMNT games, Mutant Melee aims to be more of a multiplayer-focused arena fighting game, sort of in the vein of Power Stone or Super Smash Bros.

With games like Mutant Melee, it's hard to really care much about the Turtles game franchise anymore. If you were holding out hope that Konami would finally right the Turtles franchise, Mutant Melee may be the last sign you'll need to finally abandon any and all faith. This is an incredibly slapdash and barren game that has absolutely nothing to offer you beyond monotonous, almost-broken fighting mechanics, tiny environments, and a bunch of lame unlockables. Alarming as that timeline is, Mutant Melee is so low-quality that it's hard to believe it took a full six months of development time to put it together.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Melee is the latest of the crop, coming just six months after the last game's release. Based on the current Saturday-morning cartoon series, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game franchise has gone from merely average to downright lousy in the span of 18 months.

Tmnt mutant melee soundtrack