Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 Mutant Nightmare

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles follows our favorite superhero mutant turtles fighting under the tutelage of their anthropomorphic rat father-figure and mentor: Splinter. We’ve had the pleasure of having the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in our lives since the 1980s through almost every available media avenue from a television series to video games. The first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game was in 1989 for the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES. Since then, there’s been a game almost every single year since the original TMNT game. One of those games, released in 2005 for the PS2, was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: Mutant Nightmare.

More Of What You Know

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: Mutant Nightmare adapts the fighting system of smashing whatever is in your way. There’s very little reason to change how the system works since it’s what makes the game fun but it would be nice to see some deviation of gameplay. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are action heroes after all. You would expect to only see them beating up enemies in their way.

Trying New Things

While Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: Mutant Nightmare is the same game we know from the TMNT series, it does try to bring in new things like the Mutant Nightmare ability that makes your turtle practically invincible. It’s a great way to feel like you’re the Hulk of the turtle-verse by smashing anything in your way. Mutant Nightmare also tries to have some role-playing elements in the game where you upgrade your character by collecting crystals by defeating enemies during missions. After a mission ends, you use the crystal to buy new abilities you can use for the next mission. Unlike previous titles where you only play with one or two turtles on the screen, Mutant Nightmare has all four turtles fighting at the same time. You control one of the turtles without worrying about needing to switch to the other ones. Unfortunately, they’ve upgraded the artificial intelligence of the other turtles to make them smarter, which makes the levels sort of boring as you mainly blow through them with little difficulty.

Port Of Nostalgic Title

If anything, one of the better features of Mutant Nightmare is the fact that their in-game arcade has a port of TMNT: Turtles In Time. It’s a nostalgic title for many because it’s one of the best-selling TMNT games of all time. Of course, it’s just a port of the game, so it’s a little clunky but it’s definitely a good selling point for Mutant Nightmare.

All in all, Mutant Nightmare doesn’t deviate much from the beat-em-up style of gameplay that TMNT has adapted. Mutant Nightmare is not very challenging for the average gamer but it’s a decent addition to the TMNT video game series.

Pros

• Unique cel-shaded graphics
• Arcade containing TMNT: Turtles In Time
• Mutant Nightmare uses the same voice actors of the show

Cons

• Doesn’t deviate from the classic beat-em-up fighting system
• No real difficulty or challenge to the game
• Computer-generated cutscenes are not impressive