Review #248: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 - Mutant Nightmare(DS)

 Tough as a shell.

 Konami's run with TMNT on Home Consoles, during the 2000s, was pretty good... it's a shame that the handheld games didn't fare as well. Just as with the console games, it seems like Konami had a hard time finding an identity for these games, however, while they knocked it out of the park when it came to Mutant Nightmare on PS2, the DS version wasn't half as good.

 Mutant Nightmare is based off the third season of the show, but very, very loosely. It does dabble in some of the storylines, but just barely. As far as the set-up goes, Single Player is made up of 4 'worlds', Worlds 1-3 are made up of 7-8 stages each, while World 4 is made up of 5 stages. Each turtle has slightly different abilities, which means that some turtles will be able to explore certain areas the others can't, what's more, each turtle only has access to six stages per world, so some levels aren't available for some! Which sounds really cool, and in theory, it is, but Konami made it as obnoxious as the could. Y'see, progress for each turtle is individual, so you have to play the game four times if you want to see everything. As a matter of fact, the game is cut short on 'Easy', only letting you finish World 3, and the only way to get the real ending on 'Normal' or 'Hard' is to finish the game with all four turtles, which implies playing the same levels 4 times, even, EVEN if sometimes you go through different areas. There's also a 'cooperative mode', which I wasn't able to try out, and a 'Battle mode', which is a 'collect the crystals' mini-game.

 The game is a beat'em up with certain exploring elements, when you are not bashing skulls, you are avoiding traps, by jumping, swimming, swinging or crawling around. They got rid of the annoying 'find your weapon!' mechanic from TMNT 2, THANK GOD, and combat borrows mostly from TMNT 1. You mash the B button to attack, you can charge for some special attacks, or use a desperation move by pressing jump and attack at the same time. New to the game is calling the other turtles, but it's a bit... cheap. Each world allows you to call a turtle to attack enemies up to three times(It's predetermined for each character, for instance, Leonardo calls Raph to attack), while the other two can be called to solve 'puzzles', for instance, Donatello helps Leonardo jump higher, Mikey helps Donnie jump higher, etc... except that they can only be called on predetermined spots, so basically, no thinking involved. Heck, there's some obstacles that could easily be avoided by calling another turtle to help you jump, but alas, they can only be summoned on predetermined spots. Lame.

 Now then, each stage is fairly short, 1-3 minutes tops, but they make up for it by making it brutally difficult. Keep in mind that the turtles have slow, deliberate movements, but the game will demand you to move all over the stage in order to avoid attacks and counterattack. Enemies are aggressive, and most of them have some sort of projectile attack, so you need to learn to avoid and deal with many enemies at the same time. It is pretty taxing, and surprisingly difficult for a licensed game. World 4 is particularly brutal, unfair even. It's hard for me to pinpoint exactly why, but it's not a challenge that I enjoyed. It's probably a mixture of the game being so dull, the turtles' agility not being up to snuff and Konami pretending for me to replay the entire game four times if I wanted to see the true ending.

 The presentation has received yet another facelift, kinda. The four turtles' stances were redrawn, and they look much better, in theory, for example, Raphael is now huge, since he is the muscle of the group.... however, the stances are the only thing they redrew, as soon as Raphael starts moving, jumping or crawling, he reverts to the smaller sized sprites shared between all four. It can be pretty jarring, particularly as Raphael. That said, it's a colorful game, and the DS allowed them to add 3D elements to the backgrounds, which don't look bad at all. The music is fairly forgettable, sadly.

 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 - Mutant Nightmare is far from unplayable, but even die-hard TMNT fans will have trouble liking this game.
 4.0 out of 10