TMNT The HyperStone Heist (Sega Genesis) Mega Drive Review

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Hyperstone Heist is the epitome of what every kid wanted in a video game from the 90’s. Punching the hell out of enemies until they exploded. Sega fans have been waiting patiently for quite a while up until this point while NES, heck even Super Nintendo owners each got their own beat em ups years before 1992 when Sega finally got theirs.

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The storyline goes in a different direction, Shredder steals the Hyperstone from Dimension X and uses it to shrink Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. Your favorite turtles are sent out to stop him. Yeah not exactly worthy of an Academy Award here, but at least they didn't have April kidnapped.

The gameplay is very similar to Turtles in Time and I feel that HyperStone Heist gets a bad rap for being constantly compared to the Super Nintendo release. Almost to the point where HyperStone Heist is in some sort of weird 16 bit shadow. The controls are simple, one button attacks, one button jumps and the last button lets you dash. If you push attack and jump together, you’ll lose a bit of health and throw out a desperation attack like in Streets of Rage 2. You’re also able to grab the members of the foot clan by their arms and slam them from side to side. Could you imagine doing that in real life? Gosh how much that would hurt.

There’s also the more complicated attacks like the sliding kick. I mean, look at the amount of times you can run in circles and clear out wave after wave of Foot Clan members.

I did miss the way you were able to throw the enemies at the screen. Turtles in Time on the Super Nintendo had a great boss fight against Shredder where you’re just hurling the members of the Foot Clan at the screen.

There’s only five stages in HyperStone Heist which might not feel like much but let me remind you that the levels were insanely long. For a Genesis beat 'em up that you can beat in and around an hour or so. One section I didn’t enjoy was the boss rush in the fourth stage. Boss rushes always felt like a cheap way to make the game longer since they already have the sprites available. When you could beat down the boss at the end of the stage and take a life or two versus forcing you to have to memorize the consecutive boss patterns.

The sprites all look good and there’s no screen flickering when a lot of enemies are on the screen. The usual gang of bosses are here, each with their own patterns of attacks from Krang to Stockman, heck even Tatsu who was popular from the TMNT movies at the time.

It’s often hard to love the soundtrack on most Genesis games especially when you have a superior sound chip on the Super Nintendo but Konami did a fantastic job making the most out of the Sega Genesis hardware. My favorite stage track was the Sewer Surfing stage.

Any time you could grab a friend and play through HyperStone Heist while scrolling through your list of games to play, you should consider it. It’s always one of my go to’s for side scrolling beat em ups.  

The critics back in the day had some extremely generic things to say about HyperStone Heist like “Konami brings the arcade thrill home” Yeah no duh, wasn’t every single home console developer at the time trying to get you out of the arcade and into your home. HyperStone Heist does feel a lot like the Arcade release with the gameplay being consistently hectic.

TMNT The HyperStone Heist is easily a top 10 Sega Genesis beat 'em up and can be safely put ahead in favor of games like Golden Axe, BattleToads or Double Dragon. HyperStone Heist is an incredible game despite its flaws. Does it live up to Turtles in Time?

No it doesn’t reach that level of potential but Genesis owners still got a quality beat em up that offers great replay value.