2.5/5 ★ – Itsgrimsby's review of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection.

I am not a retro gamer, nor am I Teenage Mutants Ninja Turtles fan (I’ve just never had any engagement at all with the franchise) so the question is why did I choose to play this collection? Well to get that out of the way, it’s an easy platinum trophy and I was in the mood to go after one. However I did tell that myself that I had to at least give every game in the collection a try so I could leave my thoughts on them. As a collection as whole I think it’s presented in a slightly confusing way, not quite telling you which platform each of the games originally released on and not really having a clear menu for selecting the games. I think the games themselves break down into 4 groups. To start with the good - the beat ‘em ups. I think Turtles in Time is genuinely still fun to play and may be the only game in the collection that I actually felt I liked even by modern standards. But as a whole I enjoyed these games, I think the original arcade game had a lot of personality and I liked the vibe of the beach level in The Manhatten Project. The only problem I had with these games is that they were all quite similar and did make up the bulk of the collection. Next up is the Tournament Fighter games (all the same title but different platforms which in that era actually meant completely different games). These aren’t good compared to modern fighting games (not that I am an expert by any stretch) and just amounted to button spamming and hoping, they also do not play way on a PS5 controller. The Gameboy games are part of the collection, of which there are three. The first two are very very bland games, with the second having the added annoyance of truly awful audio. I know they’re a product of their platform but it doesn’t excuse them for being bad games. Radical Rescue is a completely different type of game, and probably a lot better than the others, though again the limitations of the gameboy really made it hard for me to spend any time with this one. And the final game is the worst of the lot, the NES game simply titled Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And it’s bad. It plays awfully and is pretty uninteresting. Proof that a lot of games just don’t age well and if you’re not someone who has a passion for retro games you’re not going to get a lot from them. I think I value the collection as a window into the past, and I do like the arcade beat ‘em ups, but honestly there’s so much else in here that just isn’t worth your time in 2025.