TMNT Mutants in Manhattan Review

The pizza loving ninja killing Turtles with attitude are back and this time it’s to defeat the mutants in Manhattan. Even the older gamers among us will have watched the Turtles and now certainly on my part, my kids are watching them. Recent outings of this children’s classic have left me a little frustrated as they have lacked depth and character.

This time out there is plenty to keep you busy and even an online co-op mode where you and 3 other Turtle loving friends can join forces to defeat the evil foot soldiers and ultimately your arch rival Shredder.

A quick 10 minute tutorial will get you fuelled and ready to go with enough skills to take down the entire foot soldier army. Jump straight into Story mode and prepare to take on the 9 levels created by the IDW Comics author Tom Waltz.

Choose your difficulty, character, and my favourite area of the game, Turtle Loadout.

Offering 4 Ninjutsu loadouts including some cool original combo attacks like Shuriken Rain, Super Sumo Slap and the one I am most intrigued to try, UFO attack. Not only can you choose from a huge selection but also you can upgrade to increase the power of the attack and lower the cooldown time.

Best thing is, it does not end there Collect charms in-game to use in future missions with faster movement, Homing Shuriken, Undercover (so you are harder to spot) to name but a few. It’s got loads to do at the end of each mission to help make it more enjoyable in whatever way you see fit.

Missions are filled with your usual content, hack and slash some foot soldiers, do an objective or two and kill an end of level boss. Use teamwork to succeed faster and more efficiently to increase your score and gain the best rank among friends or the online leaderboards.

Visually it’s great, the cartoon feel almost makes it like a comic book, sketchy lines, pencil lines and raw visuals make it a pleasure to play and each turtle is easily identifiable however you will be jumping round so fast you most likely won’t notice what’s what.

On the sound front, I’d turn it off, by far one of the most annoying soundtracks ever attached to a game, and the effects are lacking in variety as well. This is unfortunately the capitulation of the game, it’s just lacking variety.

SUMMARY

I’m sorry to say though, that’s the end of it. Whilst it’s good fun to play with friends the limited campaign really makes this a winner for the younger gamers (ie those watching it on Nickelodeon) to play with their friends but for the older generation watching those ninja killing turtles this will just be a small blast down memory lane.