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It has been a little over a year since Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem arrived in cinemas, and a lot has changed for the heroes in a half-shell. Shredder’s Revenge has welcomed not one, but two DLC packs, THQ Nordic has announced a Last Ronin adaptation and, in 2024 alone, the Switch has already landed a pair of new TMNT releases. In short, when Outright Games and developer A Heartful of Games announced they were working on a tie-in to the 2023 movie, our reaction was something along the lines of, “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
One year on, and we are quite frankly impressed at how ambitious that tie-in turned out to be. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed packs an entire follow-up story into its 15-hour runtime with wonderful voice acting and far more Persona (yes!) influence than we ever would have expected. It’s very much not without its flaws — the combat is repetitive, the plot feels bloated, and the performance on Switch regularly moves at a snail’s (or should that be turtle’s?) pace — but it does aim for something slightly different, and that deserves praise.
For those who have seen the 2023 film (and if you haven’t and don’t want to know what happens at the end, look away now), Mutants Unleashed takes place right where its source material wraps up. After Leo, Raph, Mikey, and Donnie save New York and defeat Super Fly, Mutants are quickly welcomed into society. But as the Fab Four start to experience the joys of high school, friends, relationships, and hobbies, a group of Mutant newbies (or “Mewbies”) begin causing uncharacteristic chaos, putting the teens’ new-found lifestyle and the reception of all mutants, on the line.
It’s a neat enough set-up, and while things veer dangerously into the realm of massively overstuffed by the third act (there were three separate occasions in which we thought we were done, only for a new mission to emerge), we appreciated it amongst the usual plot swathes of ‘the Turtles need to protect a society that hates them’ or ‘time-travelling aliens are causing havoc, again.’
Working through the main storyline follows a simple enough formula: the Turtles have an objective to get to and a group of Mewbies stand in their way. The combat is button-mashy enough that it can easily be played with a younger Player Two (two-player local co-op is available throughout), but there’s room for some complex combos thanks to four Turtle-specific skill trees that you’ll unlock along the way. The platforming side of this ‘Action/Platformer’ mash-up provides little challenge, but, again, it’s a fine welcome to those new to the genre, and there are a couple of collectibles in each level to keep even the well-versed mildly entertained.
The problem is that all this grows rather repetitive. There are only so many locales in which these missions take place, and after hitting them up a couple of times to free a captured mutant pal, steal a thingymajig or track down a whatchamacallit, the stream of ‘Y’-mashing encounters began to feel like a chore. Combine that with camera controls that are stubborn at best, and the gameplay resembles something closer to the TMNT movie tie-in to some of the better attempts we’ve seen in recent years.
Fortunately, and here’s where that ambition comes into play, Mutants Unleashed is more than just its main story. The plot is the central thrust, of course, but the game employs a Persona-style Day/Night cycle between the main missions with a ‘Due Date’ countdown before you need to dive into the next. In this downtime, each Turtle has his own side story which unlocks a new skill tree level — Leo takes leadership advice from a young entrepreneur, Mikey starts a podcast, Donnie teaches a kid how to stand up for himself, and, our favourite, Raph comes to terms with his anger while befriending a Paralympic-hopeful swimmer. Alternatively, all four set out on pizza delivery time trials or dojo combat minigames. As long as there are days left on your next mission, you’re free to do as you please.
These side missions have the material bonus of expanding the heroes’ skillset, but, more importantly, they break up the cycle of button mashing and provide some much-needed character development in the process.
Each sequence is sold by its voice actors, with Mutant Mayhem’s teenage main cast returning to lend each Turtle a touch of child-adjacent whimsy that made the film so joyful. Seriously, after hearing these four in their starring roles again, we’re baffled at how the heroes in a half-shell have been in their dark/edgy phase for so long. There are even some nice meta-callbacks peppered throughout, with the Turtles’ obsession over a beat ’em up series called Sushi Sharks being a particular highlight.
Unfortunately, and it is a rather large unfortunately, the game’s performance on Switch mars these otherwise potentially touching moments. Every line of cutscene dialogue is followed by a lengthy pause which even the quippiest quip from Mikey can’t overcome. The visual style, which resembled something close to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in the movie, has not translated well to the game, leaving each character with a dead look behind the eyes in most cutscenes and making them difficult to track in combat encounters, particularly with two-players on-screen at once. Large frame drops are frequent throughout, and we encountered more than a handful of hard crashes which saw the game unexpectedly close and left us to restart the level again.
And that’s not to mention the load screens. These pop up before and after each level, cutscene, and location change, and regularly run in excess of 40 seconds. A day-one patch was released to reduce these times, but we found the changes to be marginal and didn’t notice more than a handful come in under 35 seconds.
Normally, this wouldn’t be the end of the world, but when the game’s most appealing side content (which might amount to a one-to-two-minute cutscene) is wrapped up in at least a minute of staring at a pizza box auto-save icon, it’s difficult to find the enthusiasm to dive in.
Conclusion
We’d always rather see something aim high and fall short than settle for another dime-a-dozen action/platforming experience, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed certainly sits closer to the former. A Heartful of Games has made some noble swings here and some of them pay off – heck, nobody expected the Persona mission structure in this TMNT game. Unfortunately, all this ambition is overshadowed by performance issues that make even its most approachable elements feel like a chore. It’s a fine welcome for younger fans keen to kick some shell after watching Mutant Mayhem, but this joint requires some serious scrubbing if it is to live up to its big-screen counterpart.