Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants

I came to Wrath of the Mutants hoping for a couch multiplayer throwback worth recommending, and left with a shorter session than most people spend in a pregame lobby. This is a 2024 console and PC port of a 2017 Raw Thrills arcade cabinet based on the 2012 Nickelodeon CG cartoon, and basically every link in that chain shows its age. The core setup: pick one of the four turtles, move right, hit things, repeat across six stages. Each turtle carries their signature weapon and a Turtle Power meter that builds as you fight. Fill it and you get a unique screen-clear animation tied to each character - Leo's tornado, Raph's ground pound, Donatello's electric surge. In the moment, those feel decent. The problem is that outside of those specials, the moveset is a single attack button with rudimentary combos, a jump, and a grab-and-throw. There is no block. There is no dodge. All four turtles play almost identically despite their different weapons, which drains whatever character differentiation the license promises. The combat loop itself is not completely broken - controls respond, and the Turtle Power system adds a small rhythm to the fighting. But the level design around it is lazy. Enemies spawn in waves that gang up on you, and a frustrating number of ranged opponents attack from completely off-screen positions you cannot reach without shuffling to the other side of the stage. Every hit briefly stuns your character, so incoming damage chains together in a way that feels arbitrary rather than earned. Bosses recycle the same attack patterns over and over and function more as HP sponges than actual mechanical challenges. The difficulty reads less like intentional design and more like an arcade machine that was calibrated to drain quarters - and the two-continue limit with a hard Game Over state was carried over from the cabinet verbatim, which is a baffling call in 2024. The home port adds three stages and six boss encounters on top of the original arcade lineup. New environments include Dimension X and an amusement park, and they mesh in reasonably well aesthetically. The 2012 show's voice cast is present, which is a genuine bit of fan service. Audio elsewhere is rough though - the soundtrack is thin and forgettable, and character one-liners loop so aggressively that muting the game starts sounding reasonable within the first stage. Visually, the 3D character models look dated and environments are sparse. There is a score leaderboard per stage if you want a reason to return, but given how shallow the combat system is, chasing score lines offers minimal pull. Who actually gets value here? Younger players unfamiliar with Shredder's Revenge or the Cowabunga Collection, fans of specifically the 2012 animated run who just want to see those character models moving, and anyone with three people on a couch who need something low-friction for forty-five minutes. In that last scenario, the four-player local co-op does generate some energy and the game becomes passably fun in the same way an airport arcade cabinet does - quick, mindless, over before it wears out its welcome. The moment you sit down alone with it, the thinness of the whole package is obvious. No online multiplayer at all is a significant miss for a game whose best quality is its co-op potential. If Shredder's Revenge is already in your library, there is basically no justification for this one at full price.

Fred · Scout Team

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