No sooner than purchasing TMNT Mutants Unleashed from everyone’s favourite high-street second hand retailer, said pseudo-movie follow-up was available to play for free on Xbox throughout a weekend. Turns out this wasn’t a blow to my wallet, as it was merely a two-hour trial. At around 12-14 hours, this isn’t something that could have been blitzed easily in a weekend either. Not without skipping chores and ordering a pizza takeaway for dinner, anyway.
The two-hour trial did, however, send achievement ratios spiralling, with all but one achievement flagging as rare upon being unlocked. It seems players were only able to get as far as beating the first boss – a tag team battle between warty stalwarts Bebop and Rocksteady.
TMNT Mutants Unleashed launched late last year, and like a lot of games aimed at younger players, it didn’t gain a whole lot of press coverage. The reception it garnered was mixed, and after playing through this adventure beat’em up, it’s easy to see why.
The intentions here were good, I don’t doubt that. It appears to have had a longer development cycle and (possibly) a bigger budget than most titles OG Games put out, perhaps hoping to appeal to a broader demographic. The visuals mimic the sketchbook look of 2023’s Mutant Mayhem well, and our four heroes are a chatty bunch, with snappy dialogue running not just between stages but also during. It carries on the themes from the movie, with Bebop and Rocksteady being a neutral party. Paring the duo with Ray Fillet and putting them in a three-piece band works surprisingly well.
Essentially, what we have here is a five-hour game stretched into one around three times that length, reusing stages – albeit from different angles, or simply reusing chunks – and with an incredible amount of filler between. When you’re not beating up ‘Mewbies’ (new mutants mysteriously turned savage) you’re forming relationships with April, Bebop and Rocksteady, Mondo Gecko, Wingnut, and a whole host of human characters – including a tech whiz, a corporate CEO from an outreach program, and a competitive swimmer. They provide sub missions that feel insubstantial, making you revisit a stage to beat up some Mewbies, or take on a timed pizza delivery challenge. Problem is, even the story missions feel light. It may seem that a boss battle is on the cards, only for a mission to simply track them down to occur. Many stages end abruptly, with nothing to show for your efforts than another sub-mission appearing on the map, or barely enough XP to unlock a new attack.
Several years ago, I covered the classic TMNT arcade game, focusing on how it set the standard going forward, with the bodacious bros forever typecast to star in scrolling beat’em ups. I think maybe my disappointment with Mutants Unleashed stems from what came before it, in the sense that we’ve come to expect TMNT games to feature mindless brawling and a fight against a renowned adversary at the end of each stage. Going against the grain further, this was seemingly made for solo gamers, with the co-op mode feeling tacked on.
But part of me also believes that times have moved on, and maybe this is simply aimed at a younger crowd who’ve only seen the likes of Turtles In Time played on YouTube, and might want to spend time with the new personas the turtles bear, spending downtime in the sewer, talking to NPCs, playing mini-games (Mutants Unleashed has a faux AR mutant tracker), and exploring the sketchbook world. The beat’em up action here isn’t bad – and there are plenty of moves to unlock – but it’s also overshadowed by the sheer amount of filler, while suffering from a limited enemy roster. It is however refreshing that we aren’t up against Shredder, Krang, and the Foot Soldiers for the umpteenth time.
TMNT Mutants Unleashed offers a glimpse of what a Turtles game could potentially offer outside of mindless brawling, but I’m not convinced that’s a path the franchise should go down. The amount of downtime between stages, the high frequency of loading screens, and the need to regularly drop in on NPCs for a chat drags the experience down. Imagine witnessing what the turtles get up to when they aren’t fighting crime – that’s Mutants Unleashed in a half shell. To quote Elvis Presley, “A little less conversation, a little more action, please.”