The rest, on the other hand, are needless distractions. Items are all over the place, but only the pizzas, which restore health, are of any service in a major fight. Ranged weapons don’t chip away nearly as much health as they should, and are awkward to pull out in battle. Power boosts offer a similarly minimal effect.
Still, one imagines if the superfluous items were grafted onto a game whose core combat worked, it would be less of an anchor around the game’s neck. And unfortunately, the crux of the matter is that combat is a disaster. The core is certainly easy enough to understand, with two attacks, a jump, and a dodge, but hits have no heft, and even the simplest enemies in the first level take an inordinately long time to kill. Ninjutsu attacks, for all their flash and flair, don't always knock an enemy down, only knocking off a small portion of their health bar.
The biggest detriment to combat is the sheer inability to tell what exactly is happening in any of it. If all of the above happened with just one Turtle onscreen, that’d be lackluster and frustrating, but still fundamentally understandable. But Mutants In Manhattan is a perpetual four-player experience, with three immeasurably broken A.I. Turtles picking up the slack when you haven’t roped friends into the fray. Four turtles fighting in the same area at the same time turns the battlefield into a sparkly cartoon dustcloud of mayhem.