Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhatten. I wanted it to be good, early impressions didn't paint a pretty picture, but I kept my hopes up, but ultimately, it's just not very good. After releasing Legend of Korra, which was an okay-ish budget game, with pretty nice combat, and Transformers: Devastation, which was surprisingly good and had addictive fun gameplay, I was hoping that TMNT would be an improvement over the last two games, or at the very least be as good as Transformers.
TMNT has to be the worst of the 3 budget games released by Platinum Games so far. It's the most pretty to look at, but also the least fun to play. There's nothing even remotely resembling any of Platinum Games previous works. If you had any hopes for a TMNT game with a pretty nice combat system, this is not it. It's pretty basic. You have a weak and strong attack, and can string a number of different combos with them. You have a dodge, that depending on how you time it, lets you parry an attack and get an enemy off-balance, or lets you slide behind them, so you can basically ride piggy back, and pound their heads in. You know, that timed dodge might actually be the only thing that's classic Platinum.
Levels are pretty straight forward. Every stage leads to a boss encounter. But before you can get to the boss, you basically just run around, doing random tasks like finding enemy hideouts, hacking terminals, disarming bombs, catching a Foot Ninja before he can run off with a bag of money, protect Pizza Stalls, etc. And every time you finish one of these random tasks, the boss meter at the top of the screen fills up. And you get lead by April closer and closer, to where you'll eventually have the boss encounter. I think in Slash's level, I ran a good 15+ minutes through the sewer, from one random task to another, pretty much only beating a handful of enemies each time, until I reached the boss area. The Mission structure is just terrible. No other way to describe it.
So, we covered the combat system. Outside of the regular combat, you also have special abilities. You can equip up to 4, and continue to upgrade them. You have healing circles, can slow down time, have ultimate attacks which you can perform alone or as a team up attack, etc. There's a bunch that you can unlock as you level up and fulfill the necessary requirements for. Then there are also Charms, which are similar to those upgrades in Transformers: Devastation, which increases your Item Find percentage, your attack, defense, gives you invincibility while you revive your Teammates, etc. You can only equip up to 2 charms at a time, unless you play on Hard, then you get to equip 3. The charms are also upgradable.
I finished the game alone on Normal. It was a so-so experience. There was really nothing that wowed me. The whole game was basically just a dog pile fest. But I stuck with another TMNT game that was just torn to pieces, and was willing to give this one more chance. So I tried to play this online with other people, and on hard. It made it actually even less fun. Not because people didn't know how to play it, but because Hard Mode pits your squishy Turtles against enemies that will most of the time one-shot you, and just have a ridiculously big health bar. The usually short levels just got excruciatingly boring, as I kept wailing with 3 other people on a big robot, that kept one-shoting us. And once we got past that part, we had to fight off a Horde of Rock Soldiers, that would barely slow down, even though now we'd be sitting atop one of those annoying Robots, and rain a laser inferno down on them. Ended up just jumping from rooftop to rooftop, to gain some distance.
Final verdict ★★☆☆☆. The combat is smooth and responsive, but there's just no depth to it. Which would be more than fine for a regular street brawler, if the rest of the game were just any fun to play. If you still want to play it, definitely wait for a Price drop. Or just rent it for the weekend, and get it out of your system.
I'll stick with TMNT: Out of the Shadows. Might have gotten trashed by everyone and their mother, but I played it recently again and immediately had more fun, even if the combat is sluggish and has a pace that you need to get used to.
[YT]WSYcm86g4OQ[/YT]
