Get This Totally Tubular Arcade Classic in April This Year

28th February 2024: Cowabunga! The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are breaking out of the arcade with today’s announcement of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants, an expanded version of the 2017 Raw Thrills' arcade classic. Play as the Turtles solo or in action-packed local co-op for up to four players when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants releases 23rd April 2024, on PlayStation®5, PlayStation®4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam.

Join Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello and Michelangelo from the 2012 Nickelodeon series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in this exciting arcade-beat-em-up inspired by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time. Battle your way across Coney Island, Dimension X and more on a mission to defeat the Foot Clan and your arch-nemesis Shredder!

Key Features:

• Double the Mayhem: Fight your way through six stages and 13 boss battles, including three all-new stages and six new boss battles not present in the original arcade release.
• Play as the Four Turtles: Leo, Raph, Donnie and Mikey, voiced by the talents of the 2012 TMNT series (Seth Green, Sean Astin, Rob Paulsen, Greg Cipes), are ready to fight against the evil Foot Clan!
• Unleash Turtle Power: Use special super attacks unique to each Turtle to devastate waves of enemies and find tokens to summon mutant backup to help clear your foes.Team Up in Local Co-op: Play with your friends in four-player local couch co-op.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants launches 23rd April 2024, on PlayStation®5, PlayStation®4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam for £24.99.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants is developed by Cradle Games and Raw Thrills and published by GameMill Entertainment. For more information, visit tmntwotm.com.

About GameMill Entertainment

GameMill Entertainment, located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is a third-party publisher of console and mobile games for passionate fans around the world. Development platforms include PC, Nintendo Switch, Microsoft consoles including the Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One, Sony consoles including the PlayStation®5 and PlayStation®4, and mobile devices. With development across the globe, GameMill is a source of entertaining and fun games for all ages. For more information, visit https://gamemill.com, as well as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

About Nickelodeon

Nickelodeon, now in its 44th year, is the number-one entertainment brand for kids. It has built a diverse, global business by putting kids first in everything it does. The brand includes television programming and production in the United States and around the world, plus consumer products, digital, location-based experiences, publishing and feature films. For more information or artwork, visit http://www.nickpress.com. Nickelodeon is a part of Paramount’s (Nasdaq: PARA, PARAA) global portfolio of multimedia entertainment brands.

About Paramount Consumer Products

Paramount Consumer Products oversees all licensing and merchandising for Paramount (Nasdaq: PARA, PARAA), a leading global media and entertainment company that creates premium content and experiences for audiences worldwide. Driven by iconic consumer brands, Paramount Consumer Products’ portfolio includes a diverse slate of brands and content from BET, CBS (including CBS Television Studios and CBS Television Distribution), Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Pictures and SHOWTIME®. With properties spanning animation, live-action, preschool, youth and adult, Paramount Consumer Products is committed to creating the highest quality product for some of the world’s most beloved, iconic franchises. To view our range of consumer products and Paramount branded apparel, visit ParamountShop.com. Cradle Games and the Cradle Games logo are trademarks and or registered trademarks of Cradle Games, Inc.

Copyright 2021 Raw Thrills, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

 

Article by: Susan N.

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Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga Continues - XB1 Review

Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga Continues by developers GameMill Entertainment, Flux Game Studio and publisher GameMill Entertainment —Microsoft Xbox One Review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga Continues tries to create an original storyline in the Karate Kid universe that tries to sprinkle some interesting elements into the tried and true beat-‘em-up formula. The light RPG elements and ability to choose one of two sides to see the story through are welcome touches to an otherwise overage brawler title with a familiar name.

Things kick off with a story / campaign mode that is presented in two halves. You get an intro and then you have to select which side of the story you will represent between Miyagi-Do and titular Cobra Kai. It’s a cool way to present the content and you get a bit of extra replay value if you care about the narrative, as it is the only way to really get the whole story. More than just plot points though, this choice has the more tangible impact of deciding which pool of characters you will be controlling, though both sides are pretty evenly represented, though the Cobra Kai is naturally geared more towards offense (fire) while Miyagi-Do focuses on defense (ice). It’s a small distinction that feels true to the property.

Once you get away from the various dressings and focus on the core mechanics, you find a pretty cookie-cutter beat-‘em-up formula. You use a variety of punches and kicks as you plow through waves of opponents that generally provide minimal resistance and are mostly there to chip away at your health before the showdowns with boss opponents. However, Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga Continues does manage to keep things a bit more interesting due to the lightweight RPG progression system that unlocks new moves along the way and help the combat to develop nuance. Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga Continues is seldom overly difficult, and by and large you can progress through the game without really using the upgraded moves and just punching people into submission. That being said, the high damage of the parry / counter system is a nice motivation to mix things up, because as you get better with these mechanic, you can progress more quickly.

There are some special moves you can unlock as well, each one specific to the character you are using that look flashy and help to lay on the extra damage, even if these sort of ‘super power’ moves feel a bit out of alignment with the actual aesthetic of the show / movies they are based on. Still these moves combined with the unlockable skill trees help to keep the combat from getting too stale.

This is a good thing, since the combat itself feels a bit rough around the edges at times. There’s just something that fundamentally feels slightly ‘off’. Maybe it’s the occasionally dicey hit detection (there were times I was just stunned that my kick seemed to miss when I was certain it would land), or the later stages throw hordes of enemies at you in such a way that it just feels kind of cheap. These two things hurt the game’s pacing. It does not help that the character animations also have just a hint of the jitters at times, which probably what leads to the aforementioned contact issues.

I will say however, that this considerable length almost works against Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga Continues in the end, especially when you do a second playthrough that essentially has you walking new characters through the same environments you already saw. One playthrough was fun more often than not, despite the inconsistencies in the combat, but by the time I finished the game a second time, I was ready for it to be done. Maybe if I had given the game a bit more time to breathe between playthroughs, that would have helped, but I suspect most of it just boils down to the occasional annoyances over hit detection / enemy swarms in the later stages.

In terms of the actual presentation, the music does the job, fitting the beat-‘em-up action, even if the voice acting is pretty lackluster and the sound effects tend to be rather repetitious after a time. Aside from the somewhat uneven animations, the overall graphics are just kind of average. There is an impressive number of environments (there really are a lot of levels here, making this a longer game than the brawler genre usually sees – even before you consider the almost mandatory second replay), it’s just a shame that none of them are overly interesting to look at. The character and enemy variety is a bit more varied than usual in the genre as well.

Summary

Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga Continues is a pretty average overall all beat-‘em-up game with lackluster presentation that gets an assist from varied characters, a split narrative that encourages replay and a solid sense of RPG-lite progression kept me going longer than I probably would have otherwise. There’s a decent brawler here that fans of the Karate Kid property will probably enjoy, but I do hope a future patch can smooth out some of those rough edges in the core combat.

Score: 6 / 10

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G.I. Joe: Operation Blackout - XB1 Review

G.I. Joe: Operation Blackout by developer GameMill Entertainment, IguanaBee and publisher GameMill Entertainment—Microsoft Xbox One review written by Nick with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

As someone who grew up in the 80’s, watching cartoons and playing with the toy action figures from shows such as Voltron, Transformers and G.I. Joe, I have to imagine that my nostalgia for that era makes me the target audience for G.I. Joe: Operation Blackout. The end result is a perfectly average third-person shooter that managed to make me smile from time to time as I recalled classic characters, but very little that I would consider memorable once I put the controller down.

The story starts off with the rare win for Cobra as you take control of either Storm Shadow or Cobra Commander – two great characters to being with really, as they raid a Joe battleship in an effort to… well, this is video game / Saturday cartoon levels of ‘take over the world’ here, so the details aren’t really all that important. The story is not terribly deep, but neither is the source material that the game is based on, so to that end it all works just fine. The story is told through a comic book style of still images that update here and there to serve as the cutscenes. In most cases this would seem rather budget-friendly, but here it is not all that distracting given the source IP.

Still, these scenes are generally brief – the meat and potatoes are in the combat which is perfectly serviceable. You have a third person shooter sans cover mechanics, the ability to switch between weapons while picking up more throughout the level, some grenades to toss for some splash damage, melee attacks when close to an opponent and a super power that charges up similar to Overwatch that is unique to each character. There is even a Gears of War-like active reload that works nicely within the gameplay. The actual shooting mechanics are a bit loose, and I found myself favoring rapid fire weapons that have a ‘spray and pray’ approach over harder hitting but slower ones that required precision to use well. There is some aim assist that can be turned on, but with the lack of a good cover mechanic, enemies swarming from all around and a somewhat fast gameplay, precision is not really the name of the game here.

There are seventeen different missions to be played, and a dozen characters to work with (with half being Joes and half being Cobra as your stages have you flipflopping roles – probably the coolest narrative choice really as it was fun to see both sides of the story). Masked characters like Cobra Commander, Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow tend to look a bit better than the actual blocky facial features found on the other characters, and visually G.I. Joe: Operation Blackout is pretty mediocre overall. There is that bright, cartoon aesthetic at play which works well, but environments are pretty same-y and characters can seem a little weird in movement during up-close and personal combat (this really stood out to me in the first mission when I was using Storm Shadow and trying to use melee attacks on my opponents because… well, ninja with swords). It's undeniably fun with plenty to shoot and slash at - just not the most polished of experiences.

However, each of the characters has their own stats (defense, speed, rate of fire, firepower, etc) that makes them feel different from one another in combat. They are also pretty decently voiced. There wasn’t anyone that I just sort of went: huh – that didn’t sound like I was expecting him / her to. In particular Cobra Commander is pretty spot-on with the shrill-sounding voice of my youth. Music is appropriately fast-paced with plenty of bombastic sound effects to represent guns, lasers and explosions along the way. There is a evident appreciation of the source material, even if this is also clearly not a AAA title either.

Missions can be replayed at varying difficulties, and the stages themselves are generally well laid-out with handy markers that pop up pointing you to specific objectives or telling you where to go next, which is helpful amidst all of the chaotic shooting taking place. This makes for some perfectly solid short bursts of gameplay (each mission can usually be completed in about 15-25 minutes), though I didn’t see any kind of online multiplayer – just local, which feels like something of a missed opportunity. Given that the game was built with two players in mind (each mission has two characters working together – either you and an AI or someone on your couch joining in with you). That really hampers the multiplayer aspects (of which there are a few modes such as Capture the Flash). 

Summary

G.I. Joe: Operation Blackout is a perfectly serviceable shooter, even if it is not a complex one. The story, the lack of rpg / progression elements and not having a cover system make this more of an arcade-y shooter while you work through the different missions. The characters themselves are the star of the show, and they did a great job in stirring up my nostalgia for the series, even if the rest of the game is solid while doing very little to stand out.

Score: 6 / 10

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Deer Hunter: Reloaded - Xbox One Review

Everything about Deer Hunter: Reloaded feels like a mockery of hunting and gamers that happen to enjoy hunting. From the horrific animations to pointless single-track mobility to the fact that you can simply game the system by fast traveling between areas to refresh their animals. Though it may be something of a port of the mobile Deer Hunter, what we have on Xbox One is a mess of bad animations, unrealistic bullet physics, and a near-identical acquisition yet horrific attempt at Rebellion's signature X-Ray slow motion Kill Cam is laughably bad. If you truly despise someone, Deer Hunter: Reloaded would be the perfect gift to give them.

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