Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants Review

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants brings the game centre right to your home. This is a re-release of the title that came out in 2017 and was based on the 2012 Nickelodeon TV series. This new release has added three new stages to the original six and an extra six bosses to add to the roster of 13 foes to face off against. The original voice actors from the show were brought in to voice their characters in the game. Voicing the Turtles, we have Seth Green as Leo, Sean Astin as Raphael, Rob Paulsen as Donatello, and Greg Cipes as Michaelangelo.

There isn’t really anything for a story here; instead, we just have an action-packed button masher for not only solo play but also four-player local co-op. You will battle in one of the five stages; they can be played in any order, and you select from Dimension X, T.C.R.I., Sewer, NYC, Amusement Park, and Shredder, but this one is locked until you complete the others. The gameplay is similar to other Turtle games that you would have played in the past: clear all the enemies on the screen and move to the next section of the level.

Wrath of the Mutants has three difficulties available to select from easy, normal, and hard. While you are challenging the stages, the game saves your progress automatically, so you don't need to worry about losing your progress. The levels are short, so it won't take long to replay them. Each of the levels features a midpoint and a final boss to challenge. These are all big enemies you know from the Turtles franchise, like Bebop, Rocksteady, Baxter Stockman, and Krang.

There is a pattern to these boss fights; even though they are all different characters, each has one very similar attack that requires you to jump to avoid it. It’s easy to time it right, as the game will display the word jump on the screen to help you out. There are usually objects in the room just waiting to be thrown at your opponent, so pick them up and launch them towards the enemy. You don’t need to be precise, as the game is very forgiving, and I found pretty much everything to count as a hit. Once the boss is down to about half health, a set of throwing stars will drop for you to pick up and use against your foe and any other minions on the screen.

Once you defeat the boss for that stage, you are presented with your stats and final score. A leaderboard is shown ranking the points; if your score was high enough, you will see how high you placed. This way, you can keep track of how well you did when you played through the stage multiple times and see if you can improve, or see if you can do better than your friends or family members who play the game locally with you.

Besides just using the weapon that your character is equipped with, there are multiple power-ups that you can pick up to use. There is a shell item that, when picked up, has you spinning on your shell for a few seconds, crashing into the Foot clan members and the other baddies currently on the stage. There is another item that fills your Turtle Power meter, letting you trigger a large attack that hits all the enemies on screen. This move is unique to each of the Turtles. Donatello uses his bo as a lightning rod, lifts them all in the air, and hits them all with lightning. Raphael smashes into the ground with flaming fists, striking everyone. Michaelangelo throws pizza in the air and spins his nunchucks like helicopter blades to slice it all into pieces and shoot at the enemies like shrapnel (I wouldn’t think getting hit with pizza chunks would be lethal...), and finally Leonardo starts to spin, creating a tornado that sucks everyone in. Even if you don’t pick up the power-up, you can easily fill up the bar by getting combos from beating up the enemies on the screen. It’s pretty ridiculous how many times you can get these special attacks on a stage!

Graphics-wise, Wrath of the Mutants doesn't look amazing, especially when playing with four players on a big TV. It does look a bit dated, which makes sense since it was originally made in 2017. When I was playing by myself on the Steam Deck, it looked better because of the smaller screen. While playing multiplayer, I found that it was hard to keep track of your character with all the other Turtles, baddies, and items on the screen at the same time. Combined with the elements of the background elements in the stage.

The music is upbeat and super energetic, which fits the non-stop action. There is a lot of voice acting here; the turtles talk a lot. They are constantly commenting on everything — almost too much! Hi ya, heads up, it's pizza time! Take that! Booyakashaw. To switch it up, I would swap between the different characters to add some variety, which is easy to do whenever you die or start a new stage.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants was a fun experience, albeit an incredibly short one. I was about to complete the game on Normal difficulty in about an hour and 40 minutes. There is some replayability if you try to beat your high scores for each stage or play local co-op with others. One of my favourite moments was when I fought Kraang Sub Prime on the Dimension X level. As soon as the battle started, I realised that the boss was voiced by Gilbert Gottfried, which was awesome! If you are a fan of the other TMNT games or the show, this is a fun title to check out.