As everyone, including Ubisoft, has said, TMNT: Smash Up strongly resembles Super Smash Bros. The game focuses on four-player mayhem in dynamic, interactive, side-scrolling environments.

Of course, this release draws on the Ninja Turtles cast and settings, such as sewers and dojos. Some of the stages on display had multiple settings they progressed through, not unlike the Fire Emblem Castle Seige stage from Brawl. The game looks fairly impressive—with the right setup. The footage shown during the Ubisoft press conference looked very muddy, as did the game in action when I first played it on the showroom floor. However, this seems to have been due to poor television settings and/or cables, as others in the booth looked as beautiful as you would expect from members of the Super Smash Bros. Brawl team.

The gameplay, however, is a tad disorienting. Granted, a fast-paced, four-player fighting game isn’t easy to fully understand on the showroom floor, but I found myself far more disoriented playing this game than I did playing Melee at E3 back in 2001. Turtles is somewhere between Brawl and a traditional fighter, in which you can die by getting knocked off the stage or by losing all of your health. Part of my confusion might have come from poor character balance in the demo. Some of the characters, such as Leo, felt surprisingly sluggish, and I was unable to respond and defend myself. Meanwhile, Raphael was quick, precise, and agile, and I was able to hold my own. There were other things, though—the items you could pick up in the demo were nondescript balls with ambiguous benefits, and the move sets seemed less intuitive (although I am admittedly less familiar with the Turtles than Nintendo characters).

But there were other design choices that left me scratching my head. They only had a handful of characters on display, and since the turtles look so similar, it was very easy to confuse which character you were. They had color-coded auras to help distinguish the flagship characters, but it just wasn’t enough.It didn’t help that the game prominently displays your current rank next to your character, which can easily be confused with your player number. (From the looks of it, you’ll be able to enter your name and have it displayed next to this rank in the final game, though.) Many of the levels on display were uncomfortably close quarters. At least with the control schemes on display (Remote and Remote + Nunchuk), there were little bits of annoying waggle, such as to shake yourself off when grabbed. Ubisoft confirmed to me that the GameCube Controller and Classic Controller will be supported, though, so this may not be a big issue. Also, game also requires you to double-tap to run—even if you’re using a control scheme with an analog stick, like the Remote + Nunchuk configuration—which I found annoying.

Overall, I was left underwhelmed by the TMNT: Smash Up demo. It had all the trimmings, but it didn’t retain the accessibility and fun of Brawl, the game Ubisoft is pushing as this title’s sibling.