Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan (Game Boy review)

Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Released: 1990

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan is a hack 'n' slash game that's based on the 1987 TMNT TV series.

There's five stages and your mission is to defeat Krang and rescue April O'Neil. At the start of each stage you can choose between all four turtles and they basically act as lives; lose them all and it's game over. The gameplay is similar to Vigilante (1988, Arcades) as you simply keep walking to the right and slash enemies that try to attack you from both sides. Lots of well known characters are present including Foot Soldiers and Roadkill Rodney and defeating them will sometimes reveal a pizza that refills part of your life-bar. The action is highly repetitive and there's hardly any variety. In fact, once you've played the first minute of the very first stage you've pretty much seen everything it has to offer. It's also short and extremely easy, especially if you take the cheap route and make the screen scroll along slowly so multiple enemies don't attack you at once! The bosses have impressively large sprites but they require hardly any strategy and button mashing usually gets the job done. There's also three unlockable mini-games; the first one challenges you to guess the correct number within ten tries. It's boring and weirdly when the game says 'Bigger' it means lower and 'Smaller' means higher! In the second game the objective is to take turns removing Shurikens with the loser being the player with the last one left. It's over in seconds and is kind of pointless. The final one is a bit like Duck Hunt (1984, NES) as targets enter the screen for you to shoot. It's mildly interesting but you likely won't spend much time playing it. The shining light is the game's music which does a good job of recreating the TMNT theme.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan is forgettable with dull gameplay and little variety apart from the uninspired mini-games. It's not at all what you'd expect from Konami and it comes across as a very disappointing and shallow effort.

Random trivia: A sequel called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back from the Sewers was released on the Game Boy in 1991.