Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed review for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch

I have to admit, it’s been a long, long time since I kept up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. While they were undeniably a huge part of my youth, that was a couple of decades ago now, and as far as I was aware, the way they were portrayed in Shredder’s Revenge a few years ago was an accurate representation of how the Ninja Turtles are today.

So you can imagine my surprise when I booted up Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed and discovered that the game is a continuation of 2023’s Mutant Mayhem, which portrays the Ninja Turtles in a very different light than I remember them from 30 years ago. Now they’re more…well, teenagers, all gawky limbs and wild mood swings. Also, Splinter has transformed from wise old sensei to hunched middle-aged man, while April O’Neil is no longer a yellow jumpsuit-clad reporter, but a short, black girl.

And honestly, I have no strong feelings about any of that. It’s not as if TMNT was some unimpeachable, sacred text – I mean, the Saturday morning cartoon version that I was into back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s was a far cry from the darker comic version that started the franchise, and it’d be awfully silly if a kids cartoon in the 2020s was still trying to imitate how the series was 30 years ago.

Besides that, apart from Splinter coming off as depressingly old and the Turtles having scrawny arms and legs in the cutscenes, aesthetically Mutants Unleashed is kind of fun. It has a style that builds on the game’s comic roots but that still seems modern, with light auras and flames looking like they were scribbled into the margins of the game with a pencil crayon.

It’s a shame that, otherwise, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed is complete garbage.

Or, to be more accurate, the game’s performance is absolute garbage. After starting up the game and finding that it ran like a slideshow, I tried setting the visuals down to the lowest level, turning off all the extra effects, and changing my Legion Go’s settings to prioritize performance, but the game still ran abysmally. Any time there was quick movement on the screen – which was a near-constant, since Mutants Unleashed wants to be a Devil May Cry-style action game – the game would stutter and freeze. Not only did this make things like counters impossible, it meant that breaking through crates and barrels (another thing you do a lot of here) invariably caused brief slowdowns. For that matter, even trying to double-jump was a constant adventure, with my Turtles character falling to his doom (or at least a hit to his health more than once).

And this is all without even mentioning the loading screens. I’m quite sure that out of all my time with Mutants Unleashed, a pretty large chunk of it was spent waiting for the next level to load. Any time I triggered a cutscene there’d be a long wait for it to start, followed by a long wait of several minutes to return to the action. Even going from one room to the next was occasionally long enough for me to start scrolling through social media or do some other quick mindless task.

The most annoying part of it is that you can see a good game lurking here. On top of it being visually appealing, the combat seems like it could’ve done right by its influences had the developers only managed to get it running smoothly. There’s even a whole social aspect to the game that I didn’t touch on, which apparently borrows a little from Persona by allowing you to take time between missions to build your relationships and unlock upgrades (as someone who hasn’t played much Persona, I can’t comment on whether the comparison works).

But none of that matters when the game runs so terribly. Even if you’re a diehard fan of TMNT in its current incarnation, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed is a stuttering mess that doesn’t deserve your money.

Outright Games provided us with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed PC code for review purposes.

Tmnt Mutants Unleashed - Standard Edition for Playstation 5

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