Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed

An atrocious mishandling of the IP designed to appeal to the average caricature featured on Libs of TikTok, April O Neil is now black & "of size", Splinter looks like a happy merchant meme & the turtles sound like a collection of mumble rappers. The plot is also predictably tacky as central to it is a paper thin activism narrative about inclusion that reads like it was written by an actual 12 year old for a social studies class, which is too bad because the gameplay is fun and the art is (mostly) ok but the hideous presentation just makes it unplayable. Mods could salvage it by heavily rewriting the plot, using AI trained voice acting to replace the turtles with classic actors and removing/changing April and Splinter entirely, but the likelihood of that is low to none so it's best to avoid.

When I read the reviews I couldn't believe that it could be bad. I had no idea how come TMNT can be so awful, now I know. No normal fighting, each fighting starts with a conversation, preview and other crap. Too much talking, video, April is ugly and no fighting. Battletoads 2020 are much much better. We have a blast with my 8yo daughter each time we play it.

As a regular liker of "mixed" games, this one hurt. I really wanted to love this one. I'm a fan of TMNT but not a massive one. Just good ol' American nostalgia mostly. I also like 3d platformers and beat em ups and this is kinda that. Unfortunately, it's clearly built for small children and not really children at heart. The combat isn't satisfying because every move feels like it's doing the same thing. Every combat encounter is rewarded an S rank because the difficulty is so low. Exploration is actually discouraged because so many areas have invisible walls. And then the rest of the game... there's kind of a relationship system where you are supposed to visit other characters to unlock new abilities. I just can't care. It just amounts to taking a bit of time to load a new area and talk to the only character present. It's not necessarily that it's a *bad* game. It's just not a game for anyone out of elementary school. I'm sure small kids would like it because they don't know any bet...