Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed Review (Scottie_j)
Finished my first of at least 4 playthroughs, and I'm ready to speak my peace.
The game is split between two areas of play. Traditional action sections, and social links building. Talking to NPCs will open up new skills and resources the turtles can use in the combat sections, and I firmly believe that this is the one incarnation of the turtles where these two things could be combined in an organic way.
I am a gameplay first, and story second style of player, and I genuinely enjoyed my time with the game, and as mentioned above, am planning multiple more runs. If you don't want to engage with the more verbose aspects of the game you can easily just do the minimum to upgrade your preferred Turtle and run just the main story. Since the game doesn't have traditional RPG elements like stat raising, you will never be underpowered by just running campaign missions.
The combat is very engaging, and I feel with a bit of tweaking, could easily stand up as one of the best 3D action games the turtles have ever had. Moves are varied, options are plentiful, and each Turtle has distinct playstyles that will absolutely encourage you to pick your favorite and stick with them as your main choice. After the first missions you can select any Turtle for any mission, so you will never be forced into using a character you haven't invested any upgrades into.
The game does feature a new game plus option, and while claiming it is more difficult, I can't speak on that seeing as of where I am now, the difficulty does feel about the same. That being said, the games difficulty does start pretty tame, but by the end of your 10ish hours in the story, you will be definitely experience some fights that will require more careful and calculated play to keep from dying.
There is plenty of side content to chew on in the form of optional platforming and combat challenges, but a dedicated survival mode or arcade mode would have pushed this game just that much further into being a game that any action player or TMNT fan would get enjoyment from. As it stands now though, there will be a lot of cutscene skipping required to get back into the fights. I am really hoping that the post launch content in the season pass will rectify this issue.
I don't by any means feel that this is a perfect game, but I do absolutely feel my money was well spent picking this game up.