Sometimes, a video game surprises you by doing something you don’t expect: A plot twist, a novel game mechanic, or an idea you don’t really see anywhere else. And sometimes, a game is precisely what it says it is on the tin: What you see is what you get, for better and for worse. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade: Wrath of the Mutants is the latter. An enhanced port of the 2017 arcade game from developer Raw Thrills, Wrath of the Mutants is a very good beat ‘em up that is beaten down by a lack of content and features. It’s a tasty slice of New York pizza if you like beat ‘em ups, but only a single piece; you’ll probably be hungry again an hour later.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: Wrath of the Mutants’ visual style, story, and character designs are ripped straight from the 2012 Nickelodeon TV series. That’s a neat, stylistically distinct period in Turtles history, but its biggest inspiration is actually the 1991 arcade classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time. If you’ve ever played Turtles in Time, you should be able to jump right into Wrath of the Mutants because, on a gameplay level, they’re basically the same. You’ve got a standard attack which can double as a throw when you’re right next to enemies, a jump, a jumping attack, a dive kick, and a spin attack you perform by pressing jump and attack at the same time. The only difference I can point to is that spin attacks don’t cost health in Wrath of the Mutants, which is a welcome change since you’ll need to use it often to stay alive.
Turtles in Time remains one of the best beat ‘em ups ever made to this day, so copying its systems isn’t a bad thing, but it does make Wrath of the Mutants feel a little basic when you compare it to modern beat ‘em ups like Streets of Rage 4 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. Those used the template of games like Turtles in Time as a base to build action with more complexity, more depth, and more systems that both reward mastery and encourage replayability. That’s not to disparage Turtles in Time or say it doesn’t hold up, because it does, but it also doesn’t feel as fresh when compared to beat ‘em ups designed for current consoles, a feeling that carries over to Wrath of the Mutants.
Considering Wrath of the Mutants is a seven-year-old arcade game that predates either of those modern takes, that’s not particularly surprising. Besides, it was designed to be easy to pick up and play and suck up as many of your quarters as possible without making you hate it, so it’s probably unfair to expect it to add a lot of nuance to the genre. But if you’re being introduced to it for the first time in 2024, as this console and PC port is intended to do for a lot of people, it does feel a lot simpler than what you might be used to. Simplicity isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if you’re looking for more, know it’s not hiding somewhere here.
The Turtles’ kits are essentially the same as they’ve always been, but there are a few things to liven up the moment-to-moment brawling. The first is your Turtle Power, a powerful special attack unique to each character. Once you fill up your meter by whacking enemies with your basic katana, nunchuck, sai, or bo staff attacks, you can unleash your Turtle Power to utterly demolish regular enemies or deal big damage to bosses. You’re even fully invincible the entire time you’re letting loose, which is cool.
More importantly, these moves help establish the Turtles’ personalities. Michelangelo uses his nunchucks to carve up a pizza from midair while yelling, “We got pizza! We got pizza!” I couldn’t tell you why the slices explode when they hit enemies, and it’s probably better not to think about it too hard, but it’s an extremely Mikey thing to do and my co-op partner and I laughed every time one of us did it. Meanwhile Raphael (the angriest turtle in the history of the known universe) just punches the ground really hard a bunch of times, Leonardo spins around so fast he makes a tornado that sucks up his enemies, and Donatello turns into Raiden from Mortal Kombat and summons an electrical storm from his staff that zaps everyone around him. It’s good, goofy stuff.
And then you’ve got your item pick-ups. There are standard pick-ups like things that’ll fill your Turtle Power meter and entire boxes of pizza that will refill your health. But there are also shurikens that take out enemies in a single throw, a power-up that lets you spin around on your shell to dish out the hurt, and the ice cream kitty: an unholy terror who emerges from her cooler and zooms around like the Killer Rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. All glory to the ice cream kitty!
The best power-ups, though, are the assist characters: Metalhead and Leatherhead, a turtle robot and the world’s most traumatized mutant alligator, respectively. Metalhead launches missiles and Leatherhead deathrolls absolutely everything in sight – and both clear the screen, even if enemies in an area haven’t fully appeared when you summon them. That’s one of those nice quality-of-life things you don’t notice until it’s not there.
You’ll need all these tools because, like the beat ‘em ups of old, there is no dodge or block button (you’ll have to jump or walk out of the way manually), and Wrath of the Mutants throws a ton of enemies at you at once. There’s a lot of variety here: regular Foot Clan ninjas, ninjas with spears, ninjas with lightning guns, mousers, Krang robots with laser guns, Legally Distinct Xenomorphs, the works. You have to approach each of them in different ways, too, so you’re always on your toes.
Managing your Turtle Power meter, health, and items in the environment adds a little bit of depth and rewards you for making smart choices about when to use what, which keeps moment-to-moment decision-making fun. When you use Turtle Power at the wrong time, you’ll feel it, but its presence opens up interesting questions. Do you spend that Turtle Power now so you can start building it up again faster, or save it for a big fight to get the most out of it? Do you grab that pizza now, when your health is relatively low and there’s a lull in the fighting, or do you try to clutch this fight out and save it for you or a friend, just in case? Good beat ‘em ups force you to manage your resources and make split-second choices, and Wrath of the Mutants has that part down.
The boss fights, sadly, are less interesting as a lot of them are too mechanically similar. For example, they all have an area-of-effect attack you have to jump over, which is cool the first few times, but once you realize every boss has it, it’s just kinda there. However, a few bosses shine thanks to unique mechanics – Rocksteady’s flamethrower, Karai’s teleport, Stockman’s ability to fly and drop green goo on you, and so on. It becomes a good challenge to time your Turtle Power right and avoid their scariest stuff by being invulnerable when it happens, but not all of them have these twists, and I wish more of them stood out.
By far the coolest thing about Wrath of the Mutants is how much stuff has been added for this home release. It’s basically double the size of the original arcade game, adding three new levels and six new bosses, including a new final boss. The original voice cast from the TV show also returns, and everyone gives a good performance. The highlights are probably the late Gilbert Gottfried as Kraang Subprime – a casting as absolutely incredible as it sounds – and Kevin Michael Richardson as Shredder, mostly because his voice sounds like it was forged in the fire of a dying star. Don’t get me wrong, though: everyone here is good, and had I not known new lines or characters were added, I would have never been able to tell the difference.
The same goes for the new levels, and I love all three because each one adds something fun. The Amusement Park has you dodging rollercoasters and cardboard monsters popping up in the foreground and background as you explore a haunted house. Enemies literally teleport into the Dimension X stage, and there’s a big eyeball trying to blast you with lightning. And Shredder’s Lair is, well… where you fight the Shredder, and without spoiling things, it’s pretty cool. Not all of the new bosses are as big of a slam dunk, but several – like Karai, Rahzar, and Tiger Claw – are at least memorable. And even the ones that aren’t are funny.
Unfortunately, even with all of that new content, Wrath of the Mutants isn’t long, even by the standards of the short-but-sweet beat ’em up genre. You can finish the whole story campaign in about an hour (roughly the same as Turtles in Time, but half of Shredder’s Revenge), and it’s not particularly difficult on the standard difficulty, though Hard mode might take you a couple tries if you just try to mash your way through. Part of the reason for this is that you can effectively use the two continues per stage (which are split across everyone if you’re playing co-op) and three lives per continue to brute-force your way to the end, but on Hard, you only get two lives per continue. It a small change that makes things harder without feeling unfair and forces you to learn how to avoid damage and memorize the locations of key power-ups and health items. For my money, it’s the best way to play.
Once you’ve beaten Hard, however, there’s not a lot of incentive to keep playing besides high scores because there are no other modes and nothing else to conquer. Bafflingly, you can’t even enter your name on the high score screen; Wrath of the Mutants just records the character, so if you play it with friends and you’re switching Turtles it can be hard to know who got what score on a level.
Wrath of the Mutants’ biggest deficiency is probably its most disappointing: there is no online co-op. There is a local co-op mode for up to four players, and it’s excellent, but that means you’re limited to playing it with people in your house/apartment/condo/RV/sewer-beneath-New-York-City, or via Steam’s Remote Play workaround. This is a game I’d love to play with friends who live across the US and internationally, and it’s lousy that there’s no easy way to do it unless they’re sitting on the couch with me. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a couch co-op evangelist, especially for beat ‘em ups, but it would be nice to have the option to play with friends even if we can’t all be in the same room.
I also ran into a level-breaking bug on Shredder’s Lair that only appeared in co-op where enemies wouldn’t spawn, but we couldn’t progress. We tried restarting the level, but hit the issue again. The only way out was to use the Leatherhead power-up, which made all the enemies on the map visible. Remember how I was talking about quality-of-life things? Once he’d killed them we could proceed, but since we’d already summoned him on the previous attempt, there was no way forward. This isn’t a huge deal because the levels are fairly short and we only spent a few minutes getting back to where we were, but it’s worth mentioning.
All of that said, I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t enjoy Wrath of the Mutants. It’s a solid beat ’em up played solo or in co-op, it captures the look and feel of the TV show admirably, and it’s genuinely funny, whether it’s Donnie lamenting that the health items you come across are “floor pizza” or Krang’s robots yelling things like, “Prepare for undesirable outcome!” Ninja Turtles is as much a comedy as it is anything else, and you have to nail that to really get what makes this weird universe tick. And yes, Shredder says the line. You know which one.
