Review: TMNT: MUTANTS UNLEASHED — GeekTyrant

Set in the aftermath of the acclaimed 2023 Paramount Pictures film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, play as the four brothers to discover the mystery behind a new type of menace wreaking havoc across New York City.

Go up against 10 brand new mutants, or “Mewbies” for short, each with 5 varying forms of mutation that are set to level up the challenge. Boasting high-energy gameplay, utilize the Turtles’ unique weapons and combat styles, from Mikey’s brawler-style close range attacks to Donnie’s bō staff-wielding prowess.

The game also sees the voice actors behind the titular brothers return, with Nicolas Cantu as Leonardo, Brady Noon as Raphael, Micah Abbey as Donatello and Shamon Brown Jr. as Michelangelo, as the quartet reprise their movie roles.

Mutants Unleashed is more or less what you would expect at first glance. You play various levels that have some light platforming elements with a lot of beat ‘em up gameplay.

You can play as any of the four turtles (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, or Raphael) from the Mutant Mayhem universe with other characters such as Splinter and April making appearances as NPCs.

As you play through the levels, you’ll gain experience which you can spend back home to obtain different skills for each turtle. In addition to the beat ‘em up part of the game though, you will have story elements where you have to go to certain locations triggering dialogue with NPCs which then unlock additional skills for the turtles.

It’s definitely one that has basic gameplay that some gamers could get into and really be on a different level.

While the game does work for the most part, it’s really hard to recommend it, at least on Nintendo Switch. The overall aesthetic of the game works well and matches the movie, but if you don’t like the aesthetic, that doesn’t matter.

The gameplay is fun and works for the most part with most performance problems occurring during dialogue and loading screens. Unfortunately, the loading screens are abysmal and there are way too many of them. When I first loaded up the game, it seemed to be running pretty slow on loading and it was so bad that not only was I getting bored and frustrated, but my kid got bored waiting to play the game with me.

Later, I started timing the load screens and the fastest one was about 38 seconds while the longest timed one was about 1 minute and 30 seconds! I’ve had others that felt even longer than that too.

You combine these long load times with the fact that a fair amount of the game is pick a level, wait for the load screen, have a dialogue/cutscene occur with lengths varying from probably 1-3 minutes, wait for another load screen, and then get to play the levels which are all pretty short and you spend most of your time not even playing the game. This doesn’t feel good.

In addition, I know that the Switch is not powerful and the art style is very stylized, but there are still areas of graphics that don’t look good. Low poly counts, unblinking and soulless eyes, model clipping, etc. all contribute to a very underwhelming presentation.

Overall, I actually think the writing of Mutants Unleashed is very well done and does a great job of capturing the same tone as Mutant Mayhem. Honestly, the writing is probably the biggest strength of the game.

Unfortunately, this leads to another problem I have. Some of the dialogue cutscenes are voiced, but many of them (particularly the ones that don’t lead into a beat ‘em up level) are not voiced.

If you have these levels that are solely meant to feature conversations that grow character relationships and those are the ones without voice recordings, I think that’s a huge misstep.

If that’s not enough, I have noticed some bugs. First, little windows pop up to show you how to use new moves and abilities and sometimes they don’t like to go away. Second, there was one level that I got about halfway through and then the camera backtracked to a previous area and so I had to restart the entire level to continue it.

One area that isn’t inherently a problem but is good to know about is that Mutants Unleashed only supports up to two players. You cannot have a group together playing as all four turtles taking on the bad guys.

The silver lining is that most, if not all, of the problems that I’ve mentioned should be things that could be fixed via patches. Improved optimization could lead to much better load times and performance. Audio lines can be recorded and patched in still. Even graphical improvements can be patched in, to a degree. Unfortunately, I would not expect any patches to really address these problems.

If Aheartfulofgames patches Mutants Unleashed to at least make the load times bearable, then maybe I could recommend the game on Switch. Who knows, maybe the new Nintendo console will be able to play the game without any of these problems. Maybe the overall experience is better on other platforms. For the Nintendo Switch though, this game is very poor.