Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City Review

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City, despite a promising premise of fighting ninjas and leaping across rooftops in VR with friends, ultimately falls short due to several significant flaws. While the game offers consistent humor through its dialogue and amusing banter from the anthropomorphic turtles, this humor quickly becomes repetitive. The story itself is predictable, featuring standard TMNT characters in expected roles with unthreatening villains like Bebop and Rocksteady. The game's strongest element is its parkour system. The mechanics of jumping, dashing, and grappling are enjoyable, especially when upgraded, making traversal across the limited open-world areas a highlight. However, these satisfying movement options are unfortunately wasted on the game's uninteresting and often annoying level design. The three open-world hubs are barren and repetitive, filled with simple, recurring side activities that quickly outstay their welcome. The concept of liberating areas from the Foot Clan is underdeveloped, with regions reverting to enemy control shortly after liberation, leading to a significant amount of tedious questing. Combat is a major disappointment, described as a simplistic one-process of slashing and dashing. Variety is minimal, and attacks frequently miss enemies. Blocking and parrying are inconsistent, and combat can sometimes lock up entirely. While death has no real penalty, the uninspired fighting detracts significantly from the experience, especially in a Ninja Turtles game. Stealth offers a slightly less obnoxious alternative, but it is also poorly implemented, with enemies easily fooled. The progression system, which involves collecting "trash" to level up characters and craft items, is somewhat gratifying, with upgrades like double jumps and increased health being worthwhile investments. It's noted that each turtle levels up differently, but the lack of resource carryover between characters limits player choice, often forcing players to stick with a single turtle. The game's most redeeming quality is its cooperative multiplayer. Playing with friends as silly turtles is consistently fun, and even mundane tasks become more enjoyable in a group. The ability to work together to overcome bland combat and engage in impromptu dance battles highlights the game's potential as a social experience. However, the technical issues plague Empire City. For a short six-hour game, it is remarkably buggy, with frequent instances of unresolvable glitches, broken mission objectives, and a lack of progress saving that can force players to restart entire missions, leading to significant frustration. Ultimately, Empire City, despite its decent parkour, amusing dialogue, and co-op potential, is hampered by lifeless worlds, repetitive combat, and persistent technical problems, offering only glimpses of what a great TMNT VR game could be.