In 1991, I went to see the movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Slime. The Turtles barely used guns anymore, Casey Jones was gone, and April O’Neil was no longer Judith Hoag – which was like coming back from the holidays and finding out that the classmate you had a crush on had switched schools. To put it simply, it wasn’t what I expected and I found myself in a similar situation with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed. what me expected was a basic 3D fighting game that would end in a few hours. What do we I got it is essentially a 14-hour airy RPG, with a basic 3D fighting game combining long sections of exposition and relationship building. Unfortunately, as with The Mystery of the Slime, going in an unexpected direction does not automatically mean a good end result. Despite clear efforts on the part of developer aheartfulofgames to make Mutants Unleashed a juicy and original sequel to the 2023 film Mutant Mayhem, it quickly becomes tedious due to a significant lack of enemy variety and a compact selection of constantly reused levels. This isn’t ninja nonsense, but TURTLES’ power is narrow.
As far as I’m concerned, the original 1990 TMNT movie is untouchable, but I think Mutant Mayhem is the best TMNT movie From first. Its intentionally imperfect, hand-drawn look is extraordinary, its soundtrack is impeccable, and – as the father of a 16-year-old – it certainly features the most believable teenage Turtles ever.
Mutants Unleashed comes impressively close to replicating two of these mainstays. While the art doesn’t quite live up to the film’s exquisite, painterly look, it deftly mimics Mutant Mayhem’s hastily sketched, asymmetrical look, from its crude two-dimensional doodles of sources of smoke and airy to Bebop’s distractingly droopy, pierced nipples. The four main Turtles themselves are also in sync with their film counterparts, largely due to the return of the film’s voice stars. If the budget could be stretched to include some of the film’s licensed music, they could have a trifecta. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, but Mutants Unleashed has few more pressing problems than the lack of iconic ’90s hip hop here ( here ).
Can I kick it?
While a 14-hour TMNT RPG might sound like a slam dunk on paper, Mutants Unleashed is actually stretched to the breaking point in such a surprisingly long time. The main story missions quickly turn dreary when you find them repeating the same steps over and over again.
Mutants Unleashed tries to obfuscate the actual number of levels by having us cycle through ones we’ve already completed or by switching the stationary camera to a different angle, but it’s very lucid. Completing sections also requires way too much loading, which just seems like a cheat to mix up the order of environments used in each mission without connecting them together. Either way, climbing the same construction site, running up the same pipe, riding up and down the same elevator, and sneaking around the same cargo ships gets uninteresting quickly.
Worse yet, there is very little exploration possible. Yes, there are hidden items in Mondo Gecko – and street art to find – but Mutants Unleashed generally only punishes us for trying to stray from the path. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve tried to jump to a place where I could land, only to fall onto the street off-camera – or hit an hidden wall. In one scene, I found myself completely trapped in a place that I clearly wasn’t meant to be. I only found the hidden art by accident, following a path I thought I should have taken anyway.
The combat itself is completely serviceable, although the enemies aren’t very dazzling and don’t always do a great job of tracking you around your surroundings. All Turtles have different fighting styles that can be upgraded with recent moves as you progress through specific relationships for each of them. There’s no need to get into the weeds though, and it’s totally a button masher. This makes it approachable but quite mindless. I would try out recent moves, but mostly to get the tutorial windows off the screen where they sometimes cover your Turtles thanks to the fixed camera.
This camera didn’t bother me for the most part; I understand that it’s ultimately something of a halfway house between third-person fighting games and the 2D fighting games of the past, and Mutants Unleashed creatively replaces your character with a scratched silhouette when hidden by environmental elements. However, I have had cases where the angle was a real liability. There isn’t much technical platforming in Mutants Unleashed, but doing queue jumps and rail grinds at 45-degree angles is like lowering the TV and trying to continue playing Tony Hawk from the toilet with the bathroom door ajar.
What’s most disappointing is that Mutants Unleashed seems to be built primarily as a single-player game. Turtles you NO those selected will simply disappear at the beginning of each level, so you’ll never feel like you’re part of the fighting foursome – that’s what TMNT is all about. Sure, there’s a two-player co-op, but it’s not a four-player co-op, so it still doesn’t feel right. You can’t even see the AI Turtles lifting their shell in the background. Special assist moves make it seem like a second Turtle is involved, but activating them doesn’t actually physically transport one of your brothers into space. It just…suggested that they had slipped in and out of the tap, perhaps while you were blinking.
It also doesn’t assist that the enemies throughout the entire game are just a handful of mutants. Junk crabs. Zebra squid. Hippo luchadores. A few more. But it’s a dozen or so hours of the same bad guys. Yes, I understand that a licensed tie-in game won’t be able to introduce essential adversaries from the TMNT universe – like the Foot Clan or something – before the inevitable movie sequel. Damn, I wouldn’t let that happen either. This brings Emperor Palpatine back to Star Wars in… Fortnite. At 6am Australian Eastern Time on a random Sunday morning. But Mutants Unleashed really needed more enemy variety.
There are plenty of side quests, but unfortunately they only contribute to repetition. Civilian missions involve beating up a bunch of the same mutants on several levels you’ve almost certainly been to before. Plague missions involve going through a level you’ve almost certainly been through before and defeating the same mutants again, although this time some of them will be singled out as key targets. Pizza deliveries are basically just quick runs through the same levels, although the enemies have been removed and the map is now full of giant inflatable bounce pads and booms for no discernible reason. And no one brings pizza.
Mutants Unleashed features a time-progression system where each mission or encounter takes a day or night, and then the day continues. This limits the number of side activities you can tackle before completing the main mission, but there’s more than enough time to complete everything in one playthrough. There are about two months worth of quests, but I had a few weeks in hand before I had to complete the last few story missions, and I had no side missions left, so the time component doesn’t add much.
No Diggity
The RPG-style conversational element of Mutants Unleashed adds a lot of unexpected explanation, although I think the story of a recent wave of mutants arriving in New York and finding themselves at odds with the existing human population Is an effective and completely logical continuation of the film. It continues the theme that hate and prejudice are disgusting from any angle in which they are presented, and while “do unto others” is admittedly a message that has been ingrained in children’s cartoons for decades, that doesn’t make it any less original in this case. a recent world of TMNT where mutants and humans were suddenly combined.
Yes, not every conversation is particularly engaging and not all conversations are actually expressed. These sections are also completely passive, so there are definitely times when they are just filler. Even moments that seem made for a minigame – like Donatello visiting the arcade to play a dancing game – end up not being interactive. The indirect look at how crap Raph is in the original TMNT game is cute, but beyond that there’s a strange clash of approaches at times. I raised my eyebrows when the script worked quite tough to create an entire fantasy catalog of parodies of John Hughes films without mentioning him by name – but on other occasions overtly references figures like Clint Eastwood and Chuck Norris.
The biggest problem, however, is the pace of the dialogue. Cutscenes are completely hampered by the glacial rhythm of conversations that wait line by line for huge dialog boxes to pop up and ready-made reaction animations. This creates highly unnatural pauses between sentences and greatly kills the dynamics of conversations.
These scenes can mostly be skipped or sped up a bit by pressing a button, but they’re still necessary if you want to develop the Turtles’ relationships with friends throughout the city and unlock recent upgrades.
