Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: Mutant Nightmare review (GameCube)

Periodically the game will toss in a platforming sequence, a puzzle, or some kind of vehicular combat bit, but these are all secondary to you running around, smacking, and shanking bad guys. All these distractive bits aren't especially fun, either. The platforming sequences are just as awful as they were in Battle Nexus--there's just a lot less of them--and the puzzles are ludicrously easy at all times. One could easily attribute these issues to the fact that this is a game based on a cartoon, and so it squarely points in the direction of a younger audience. However, that's never really been the case with this series. Konami has always tried to cater somewhat to the nostalgic crowd, including the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game in Battle Nexus, and a solid (though slightly choppy) port of one of the arcade sequels (and one of the best Turtles games ever), TMNT: Turtles in Time, here in Mutant Nightmare. That's great and everything, but it's hard to imagine any kind of discerning player, the type who would actually remember Turtles in Time, trudging his or her way through such a mediocre action game just to unlock it. And as for that younger audience? It's doubtful they'd even bother with it.

Mutant Nightmare presents itself about as well as the last couple of games have. It still retains that cel-shaded graphical look in-game, with characters pronounced by thick black outlines and ultracolorful shading. It was a great look back in the day, but now it feels pretty dated. The generally unimpressive animations and environments don't do much to help matters, either. Again, the game does use a lot of footage from the TV show, but most of the scenes are really poorly compressed. Plus, every once in a while the game will switch to random CG scenes that just don't look very good at all. The voice actors from the show reprise their roles here, and they deliver the dialogue about as well as they do on TV, even though most of it is recycled from the show. All that's left beyond that in the audio category is some short, repetitive musical loops that compose the soundtrack and a lot of ninja turtle grunting. At least you won't have to hear Michelangelo shrieking "eat feet!" ad nauseam like you did in Battle Nexus.

Is TMNT 3: Mutant Nightmare better than the near-train wreck that was Battle Nexus? Certainly it is. The scarceness of the terrible platforming portions of that game, as well as the constant four-turtle action, is a definite improvement over what Battle Nexus had to offer. But even still, Mutant Nightmare lacks punch. There's just not much game here that's worth playing, and the few bits that are worth it are buried underneath a lot of overly simplistic and generally dull beatings of easy-to-kill bad guys. In the rare instance where the game gets challenging, it feels artificial and frustrating, rather than satisfying or rewarding. Turtles fan or not, just skip out on Mutant Nightmare.