Set in Paramount Pictures’ critically acclaimed 2023 film Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, play as four brothers as they discover the secrets behind a new threat wreaking havoc in New York City.
Battle against 10 new mutants, or “Mewbies” for short, each with 5 different forms of mutations designed to increase the level of challenge. Featuring high-energy gameplay, utilize the Turtles’ unique weapons and fighting styles, from Mickey’s fighting-style close-range attacks to Donnie’s Bo-staff-wielding abilities.
The game also sees the return of the voice actors behind the titular brothers, with Nicolas Cantu as Leonardo, Brady Nunn as Raphael, Micah Abbey as Donatello, and Salmon Jr. Brown plays Michelangelo, and the four reprise their film roles.
mutants released More or less what you’d expect at first glance. You can play through a variety of levels, which have some light platforming elements and plenty of beat ’em up gameplay.
You can play as any of the four turtles (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello or Raphael) mutational chaos Other characters in the universe, such as Splinter and April, appear as NPCs.
As you play levels, you’ll gain experience that you can use back home to gain different skills for each turtle. In addition to the beat-em-up portion of the game, you’ll also have a story element where you must travel to certain locations to trigger conversations with NPCs and then unlock additional abilities for the turtles.
This is definitely a game with basic gameplay that some players can get into and really be on a different level.
While the game works for the most part, it’s really hard to recommend it, at least on the Nintendo Switch. The overall aesthetic of the game works well and matches the movie, but if you don’t like the aesthetic, that’s okay.
The gameplay is fun and works for the most part, but most performance issues occur during dialogue and loading screens. Unfortunately, the loading screens are terrible and there are too many of them. When I first loaded up the game it seemed to load very slowly and so poorly that not only did I get bored and frustrated but my kids got tired of waiting to play the game with me.
Later, I started timing the loading screen, and the fastest was about 38 seconds, and the longest was about 1 minute and 30 seconds! I’ve met others where it felt longer than this.
You combine these long load times with the fact that a significant portion of the game is selecting a level, waiting for a loading screen, having dialogue/cutscenes that may be 1-3 minutes in length occur, waiting for another loading screen, and then then Start playing levels that are so short that you don’t even play the game most of the time. This doesn’t feel good.
In addition, I know that the functions of Switch are not powerful, and the art style is very stylized, but there are still some graphics that are not very good-looking. Low polygon count, unblinking, soulless eyes, model clipping, and more all result in a very mediocre presentation.
Overall, I actually think mutants released Very well done and nicely captures the relationship with mutational chaos. Honestly, the writing is probably the game’s greatest strength.
Unfortunately, this led to another problem I encountered. Some dialogue cutscenes are voiced, but many of them (especially those that don’t make it into beat-em-up levels) are not voiced.
If you have these levels that are just designed to develop character relationships and these levels don’t have voice recording, I think that’s a huge mistake.
If that wasn’t enough, I also noticed a few bugs. First, little windows pop up to show you how to use new moves and abilities, and sometimes they don’t like to disappear. Secondly, there was one level that I was about halfway through, and then the camera retraced to a previous area, so I had to restart the entire level before I could continue.
One area that is not inherently a problem but worth knowing about is mutants released Only supports up to two players. You can’t have a bunch of people playing together and have four turtles fighting the bad guys.
The silver lining is that most, if not all, of the issues I mentioned should be fixable with patches. Improved optimizations result in better load times and performance. Audio lines can be dynamically recorded and repaired. Even graphical improvements can be tinkered with to some extent. Unfortunately, I don’t expect any patch to actually fix these issues.
If you are interested in game patch mutants released At least make the load times bearable, then maybe I can recommend the game on Switch. Who knows, maybe the new Nintendo console will be able to play games without any of these issues. Maybe the overall experience would be better on other platforms. However, for the Nintendo Switch, the game performs very poorly.
