Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants

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Remember the arcades? Remember all those attempts to make downloadable games the “new” version of arcades? Somewhere between these two worlds exist family fun entertainments like Dave & Busters, Round1, and other amalgamations of food and game (and sometimes beer, for the parents) that are often the last gasps of coin-op thrills in the United States. No longer seen as state-of-the-art, relatively low-budgets and simple gameplay loops meant quarter (sorry, token) munchers would live to see another day.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants, a home port of the 2017 arcade-only beat ‘em up from Raw Thrills that unabashedly cribs from Konami’s arcade megasmash 1991’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, only filtered through designs and characters from the 2012 animated series from Nickelodeon. In an era when most TMNT games were forgettable or even plain old bad, Wrath of the Mutants had the advantage of not being terrible – and merely existing in the first place, even if only in the arcades.

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Of course, there’s been a resurgence of classic Turtle games since then, most notably the career-spanning Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, which served up the most delicious slice of arcade-style beat ‘em up action since the Konami originals. But unless you frequent what’s left of the arcades chances are you won’t be all that familiar with the original game, but that won’t matter here. The home version adds three new levels and several new boss battles sprinkled throughout, essentially doubling the length of the arcade original.

Of course, much of the enjoyment to be had from a beat ‘em up is the vibe; when everything clicks complexity matters little as you thrash your way across varied backdrops and an ever-changing roster of enemies to pummel. A good soundtrack helps, too. Wrath of the Mutants has some of these things, but not all of them.

The gameplay is extremely simple, even for a beat ‘em up, with only two attack buttons and one dedicated for Turtle (Super) Powers. There’s no real combo system to master (sorry, Streets of Rage fans), though you can jump-attack, grab and pound, and even toss baddies into the screen. In theory this all sounds fine, but in practice attacks often feels a little floaty and disconnected, which can be frustrating for those spoiled by more pixel-perfect hit-boxes and precise controls.

A filled Turtle Power bar lets you unleash – you guessed it – each Turtle bro’s unique power move. Leonardo summons a sucking tornado, Mikey serves up exploding pizzas, Donny calls down lightning from the sky, and Raph belts angry flames from the ground. Background objects can be used, too; smack parking meters, toss garbage cans, hurl shurikens, throw teddy bears, or grab that famous Igloo cooler and unleash the all-powerful flying ice cream kitty kat. You can also grab icons to call in assist characters for a little help: Metalhead, the metallic robo-turtle, unleashes a torrent of homing missiles, and Leatherhead, everyone’s favorite mutated humanoid alligator, rolls and smashes himself over the screen.

And there’s tons of baddies to bash, from multi-colored Foot Clan, robotic M.O.U.S.E.R.S, Alien Xenomorph rip-offs, and more. Bosses are culled from one of the best rogue galleries out there, including Baxter Stockman, Rocksteady, Fish Face, and (of course), the Shredder (and his Super Shredder upgrade). Question: when did Bebop become Michael Jackson?

Wrath of the Mutants isn’t difficult, but it’s super cheap. Remember: this was originally designed to suck up as many tokens as possible, which means unavoidable hits and inevitable deaths. There’s no penalties for failure, so even with the cheapness you can blast through the entire game without breaking a sweat. The only real challenge is playing on Hard Mode, which you need to unlock first. However, doing that means you’ve already seen everything so… maybe it’s just for bragging points?

One of the biggest dings against Wrath of the Mutants would be the dated visuals, which were already dated in 2017 and are even more so now. Unlike the Konami arcade and home console versions – including the recent Shredder’s Revenge – which used wonderfully crafted hand-drawn sprites, the polygonal graphics here aged like milk, giving it a cheap mobile phone aesthetic. At least some of the stages have clever moments, like the colorful amusement park or Shredder’s futuristic lair, and there’s plenty of genuinely funny Turtle-powered jokes and puns to help pave over some of the rough spots.

The sound is a mixed bag, with utterly forgettable tunes (given the franchise’s lineage, this was very disappointing), but the voiceovers are super varied and feature actors from the 2012 show. And I hope you like them because they never shut up – the game is a chatterbox of one-liners and dialogue, which I appreciated up to a point. “Booyakasha!” isn’t going to replace “Cowabunga!” anytime soon, though hearing the late Gilbert Gottfried as Kraang Subprime made me super happy. RIP.

Do I like the designs of this iteration of the Green Machine? Not really, but it’s hard to get upset whenever these characters get revised because they get revised so often, which means every generation gets their own version of Leo, Mikey, Donny and Raph.

The other real ding would be the lack of online multiplayer, only local co-op, which is sad as the game instantly becomes 100% more fun with friends. You could make the argument games like these are “more fun” when playing in the same room with a friend or three (and you’d be right), but not everyone has access to such luxuries. You can’t even assign the open character slots to a CPU turtle, which would have at least been something.

With its dated visuals and gameplay it’s hard to recommend Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants to anyone but the most diehard Turtle fans, or maybe those who loved the arcade but didn’t love feeding it tokens. It’s not great, but not terrible, and despite its shortcomings I still had a good time button-mashing my way through to the end, and there are worse ways to spend a solid hour with the Turtle boys. But with better games like Shredder’s Revenge out there this one will be a hard sell to anyone else.