If your idea of a beat-em-up is a button-mashing quarter-munching raucous party game with friends, if Castle Crashers is your idea of the last great beat-em-up, this is the game for you. I could talk at great length about the things I don't like about this game mechanically, but that's not really important to these types of fans and really misses what this game is going for. For party game fans, this game delivers in presentation and, especially with Tee Lopes beating the midi keyboard ferociously, music.
But this is not a game about mechanical depth or skilled play or variety. So complaining about it in that regard is petulant. There are a few objective measures I could complain about: It's way too damn long for having an arcade mode, but you could probably count the number of people who will even attempt arcade mode on one hand. Several of the bosses are complete garbage even by party game standards with lengthy phases of just wait for him to open his weak spot for 5 minutes. The rap song they use for fighting Shredder is trash; you can't put a rap song there that doesn't have Max Anarchy level energy!
But those are mostly minor issues. If beyond anything else you want another TMNT arcade brawler, that specific experience you had as a kid again and nothing more, this game DOES deliver that. But I do not want that. I have played too many more beat em ups to too high of a skill level to find this anything more than an exquisitely presented minigame.
