Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 - Mutant Nightmare

Konami spent three years turning the 2003 Turtles cartoon into brawlers, and by the third one the studio had stopped pretending the four brothers were interchangeable. Donatello's staff sweeps crowds and reaches switches nobody else can hit. Raphael's sai are close, fast and mean. Leonardo has the cleanest reach. Michelangelo is the awkward one, which is roughly correct. The levels are built with those differences in mind, so a stage will hand you a gap or a mechanism that quietly tells you which turtle should be holding the controller.

The plot follows the show into its Triceraton and Agent Bishop material, which gives the game a stranger cast of enemies than the endless Foot ninja of the first two entries. Aliens, government black-ops soldiers, mutants. It still resolves into the same rhythm: walk into an arena, clear it, walk on. Combat is combo strings, a jump attack, a grab and the occasional gadget section, and the ceiling on all that is low. Enemies do not pressure you enough to make the depth matter.

What holds up is the presentation. The cel-shaded look tracks the cartoon closely, the animation has weight in the wind-ups, and the sewers and rooftops are lit with enough contrast to read at speed. What does not hold up is the camera, which sits too close in corridors and swings badly in tight rooms, and a difficulty curve that mostly means more enemy health.

Co-op is where it earns its place. A second player turns the repetition into something social, and the game is generous about letting both turtles occupy the same brawl without the camera abandoning either of them entirely. Konami also kept the trilogy's habit of bundling in unlockable extras, which was the sort of gesture that mattered a lot in 2005 and matters more now.

It is a competent licensed brawler from a publisher that had made the definitive one fifteen years earlier, and it knows it. Play it with someone on the couch, or not at all.