Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: Mutant Nightmare

Mutate your Turtle as you play!

NA release: 1st November 2005
EU release: N/A
JP release: N/A
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
NGC Magazine Score: N/A
Mods Used: Widescreen Hack

The third Konami beat em up based on this series of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and, like the previous one, there’s enough footage from the cartoon to require two discs on GameCube. Also, once again, the gameplay has been rejigged, so you have to give credit to Konami for not just hashing out the same thing each time.

The turtles no longer have unique abilities to press specific buttons to progress, so you are stuck to your turtle of choice for the story. There’s more missions, but most of them just use the same small bit of map multiple times, which makes beating up the same enemies again and again something that gets tedious very quickly.

You can also control the camera this time, which may sound like a good thing but there is more challenge in finding a decent camera angle than there is in the game. Even worse is that it gets stuck on buildings and starts pointing downwards, making it hard to see. Once again, you have to rely on the radar to spot enemies spawning behind you and off-screen. There is one saving grace to this one.

When you complete episode 1, you unlock the classic arcade version of Turtles in Time, a much better fighting game with engaging gameplay. This version has been altered with new music and sound effects to match the current show, but it’s still an absolute blast, especially with more players. Of course, it’s probably not good when by far the best part of a game is a bonus unlockable version of an old game.

Fine

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.
Alex Navarro, GameSpot

Remake or remaster?

Only in a collection

Official Ways to get the game

There’s no official way to get Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: Mutant Nightmare