In 1991, I went to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. The Turtles were barely using their weapons now, Casey Jones was gone, and April O’Neil wasn’t Judith Hoag anymore – which was like coming back after holidays to find the classmate you had a crush on had changed schools. Put simply, it wasn’t what I’d expected, and I find myself in a similar position with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed. What I expected was a basic 3D beat ’em up that would be over in a few hours. What we got is actually a 14-hour light RPG, with a basic 3D beat ’em up tying together long sections of exposition and relationship building. Unfortunately, like with The Secret of the Ooze, moving in an unexpected direction doesn’t automatically make the end result good. Despite a clear effort on the part of developer aheartfulofgames to make Mutants Unleashed a juicy and authentic follow-up story to 2023’s Mutant Mayhem film, it quickly becomes tedious thanks to a significant lack of enemy variety and small selection of constantly reused levels. It’s not ninja crap, but the T.U.R.T.L.E. power is limited.
As far as I’m concerned, the original 1990 TMNT movie is untouchable, but I do feel Mutant Mayhem is the best TMNT movie since the first. Its deliberately imperfect, hand-drawn appearance is remarkable, its soundtrack is impeccable, and – as the father of a 16-year-old – it contains easily the most believably teenage Turtles ever.
Mutants Unleashed comes impressively close to recreating two of those pillars itself. While the graphics don’t reach par with the exquisite, painterly appearance of the movie, they ably ape the hastily sketched, asymmetrical look of Mutant Mayhem – from its crude, 2D scribbles for smoke and light sources, to Bebop’s distractingly droopy pierced nipples. The four main Turtles themselves are also in sync with their movie counterparts, largely thanks to the fact the voice stars of the movie have returned here. If the budget could’ve stretched to include some of the film’s licensed music, they could’ve had the trifecta. It sadly didn’t but, unfortunately, Mutants Unleashed has several more pressing problems than a lack of iconic ’90s hip hop up in here (up in here).
Can I Kick It?
While a 14-hour TMNT RPG may sound like slam dunk value on paper, Mutants Unleashed is actually stretched to a breaking point over that surprisingly lengthy duration. The main story missions quickly become dreary once you notice it’s constantly rehashing the same stages.
Mutants Unleashed tries hard to obfuscate how many levels it actually has by having us run backwards through ones we’ve previously completed, or switching up the fixed camera to a different angle, but it’s very transparent. There’s also far too much loading required as we complete sections, which just feels like a cheat to shuffle the order of environments used for each mission without blending them together. Either way, clambering across the same construction site, running through the same pipe, riding up and down the same elevator, and scurrying over the same cargo ships gets old, quick.
Worse, very little exploration is possible. Yes, there are hidden objects – and pieces of street art to find for Mondo Gecko – but Mutants Unleashed generally only punishes us for trying to veer off the path. I lost track of the number of times I tried to jump to a spot that appeared fine to land on, only to plummet to the street off camera – or be met with an invisible wall. On one stage I completely trapped myself somewhere I clearly wasn’t meant to be. I’ve only ever found hidden art by accidentally going the way I thought I was supposed to go anyway.
Combat itself is totally serviceable, although enemies aren’t very smart, and they’re not always great at tracking you through the environments. The Turtles all have distinct fighting styles that can be upgraded with new moves as you progress specific relationships for each. There’s little need to get into the weeds with it, though, and it’s totally a button masher. This makes it accessible, but fairly mindless. I’d try out new moves, but mostly to get the tutorial boxes to leave the screen, where they sometimes cover up your Turtles thanks to the fixed camera.
That camera didn’t really bother me for the most part; I get that it’s ultimately a bit of a halfway house between an entirely third-person brawler and the 2D beat ’em ups of yesteryear, and Mutants Unleashed creatively replaces your character with a scratched silhouette when they’re hidden by pieces of the environment. However, I did have instances where the angle was a real burden. There’s not a ton of technical platforming in Mutants Unleashed, but lining up jumps and rail grinds from a 45-degree angle is like leaving your TV and trying to keep playing Tony Hawk from the toilet with the bathroom door ajar.
Most disappointingly, Mutants Unleashed seems built primarily as a single-player game. The Turtles you haven’t selected will simply dip out at the beginning of every level, so you never feel like you’re part of a fighting foursome – which is what TMNT is all about. Sure, it has two-player co-op, but it’s not four-player, so that still doesn’t feel right. You don’t even get AI Turtles raising shell in the background. The special assist moves make it seem like a second Turtle is going to get involved, but activating them doesn’t actually bring one of your brothers physically into the space. It’s just… implied that they dropped in and bugged out, perhaps while you were blinking.
It also doesn’t help that enemies are just the same handful of mutants for the entire game. Trash crabs. Zebra squids. Hippo luchadores. A couple more. But it’s over a dozen hours of these same few baddies. Yes, I understand a licensed tie-in game isn’t going to be able to introduce important opponents from the TMNT universe – like the Foot Clan or such – before the film’s inevitable sequel. Hell, I wouldn’t let it either. That’s how you get Emperor Palpatine returning to Star Wars in… Fortnite. At 6am Australian Eastern Daylight Time on a random Sunday morning. But Mutants Unleashed really needed more enemy variety.
There are a host of side missions, but unfortunately these only contribute to the repetition. Civilian missions involve beating up a bunch of the same mutants across a couple of levels you’ve almost certainly been to before. Contagion missions involve running through a level you’ve almost certainly been to before, beating up the same mutants again, although this time some of them will be highlighted as key targets. Pizza deliveries are just speed runs through the same levels once more, although the enemies have been removed, and the map is now full of giant inflatable bounce pads and boom gates for no discernible reason. And no one’s carrying a pizza.
Mutants Unleashed features a time progression system, where each mission or conversation encounter takes either a day or a night, and then the day moves on. This puts a limit on the amount of side activities you can tackle before needing to do a main mission, but there’s more than enough time to complete everything in a single playthrough. There’s about two months of tasks, but I had weeks up my sleeve before needing to do the final couple of story missions and I was already out of side missions, so the time component doesn’t really add a great deal.
No Diggity
The RPG-style conversational component of Mutants Unleashed does add a lot of unexpected exposition, although I think the story of a new wave of mutants descending on New York and finding themselves at odds with the existing human population is an effective and totally logical follow-up to the movie. It continues the themes that hatred and prejudice are repugnant from any side they’re projected and, while “do unto others” is admittedly a message that’s been embedded in kids’ cartoons for decades, that doesn’t make it any less authentic in this new TMNT world where mutants and humans have suddenly been thrown together.
Yes, not every conversation is particularly riveting, and not all of them are actually voiced, either. These sections are also entirely passive, so there are definitely times when they’re simply filler. Even moments that seem custom made for a minigame – like Donatello visiting an arcade to play a dancing game – ultimately aren’t interactive. An indirect dig at how rubbish Raph is in the original TMNT game is cute, but otherwise there’s a bit of a weird clash of approaches at times. I raised my eyebrow as the script worked quite hard to concoct an entire fantasy catalogue of parody John Hughes films to not mention him by name – but then, on other occasions, overtly references the likes of Clint Eastwood and Chuck Norris.
The biggest problem, however, is the pacing of the dialogue. Cutscenes are totally hamstrung by the glacial cadence of conversations, which waits line-by-line for huge dialogue boxes and canned reaction animations to pop up. This creates highly-unnatural pauses between sentences and very much kills the momentum of conversations.
These scenes can mostly be skipped, or slightly sped up by hammering a button, but they’re nonetheless necessary if you want to progress the Turtles’ relationships with their friends around the city and unlock new upgrades.