Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City Review

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is an enjoyable hack-and-slash adventure that tries to break the mold by making New York a small scale open world. Not everything lands as well as developer Cortopia would hope, but it delivers the goods on pure fun and wish fulfillment.

Some disclosures upfront: I am a lifelong Ninja Turtles fan. From the comics to the 1980s cartoon whose theme song I can still sing to this day to the spotty history of the films and Vanilla Ice’s hit “Ninja Rap.” This review is also the third time I’ve played the game. I played a demo during Steam Next Fest and had a session with publisher Beyond Frames’ CEO, Ace St. Germain, at the Game Developers Conference in March.

So I already knew Cortopia nailed the characters, particularly the turtles. I also knew the exterior sections of New York played out like a semi open world akin to something like Asgard’s Wrath 2, albeit on a much smaller scale. This comes with enemy outposts to shut down and random crimes to prevent, with a crime level ever present throughout the game. The question I had coming into the full game was whether all of this holds up over an extended playtime.

Empire City starts with a tutorial level that lets you sample all four turtles. They each have different skill sets and a special ‘focus’ attribute that varies among the four. When fully charged by attacking and defeating enemies, this focus ability triggers, granting temporary perks like increased damage, faster focus building, and so on, depending on which turtle you select to play as. The sewer lair also houses a separate lab that serves as a physical skill tree of sorts. Here scrap that is collected throughout the game can be used to buy items, additional perks, and level up to unlock higher health and more perk or inventory slots.

With this system and the design of New York’s exterior, TMNT: Empire City straddles the line between simple adventure and full-blown role playing game. There are a lot of choices here, allowing any player to cater their preferred turtle to their preferred playstyle. That is also before getting to the multitude of collectibles through the game. Artifacts can be turned into purchasable perks. Blueprints add to the list of craftable items. The lair has a full chess board with its pieces scattered all over the city. Multiple cassette tape recordings that expand on the storyline. Completionists will have plenty to keep them occupied.

Also, Empire City’s campaign is fully playable in co-op for up to four players, so you can bring your friends in to help track everything down. In co-op, the host player is the only player whose storyline progresses, so a word of caution to anyone hoping to play part of the main campaign alone and part with friends. If this is you, then be sure to host the session or those co-op stretches of gameplay will have to be repeated solo. That said, running around the city with a buddy, wrecking outposts and stopping crime, is a shell of a good time. Another word of caution, there is a heavy amount of dialogue in Empire City, so be prepared to get interrupted often when talking to friends.

The story follows the remnants of the Foot clan in the aftermath of the death of the Shredder, the most infamous TMNT villain. The turtles find themselves caught between two ideologically opposite sides of a Foot clan power struggle. It is a good story and easy enough to keep up with if you are not familiar with the source material, with enough exposition delivered by the other characters to make sure newer fans are not left behind.

The combat in Empire City has a lot of complexity to it, with a parry system, unblockable attacks, items, and the aforementioned focus system. Unfortunately, these complexities don’t really shine when fully engaged in combat. The Foot clan, an ancient group of ninjas, comprise the bulk of the rogues gallery with multiple variants, all of which can be fairly quickly dispatched. I didn’t use a single smoke bomb after the tutorial level. Midway through the game, I didn’t even think about the focus system anymore. I just kept jumping, dashing, and swinging. With so many character customizations and skills to choose from, the combat difficulty doesn’t really befit the plethora of choices in builds.

Other than combat, the other flaw in the game is a few odd glitches. Enemies were able to hit me through walls from adjacent rooms with melee attacks. My ‘strategic retreats’ to single out each member of a squad backfired when the AI wouldn’t come through the door and instead just knew where I was on the other side and hit me. Towards the end of the game, there’s a timed sequence I failed, but because I had a ‘rebirth’ perk where I revived once if I died, I could continue. Everything in the building was “locked down” because time had run out and all I could do was reload my save and reenter the building to complete the sequence. I also had to start a new save file after a co-op session with a friend because I could not complete the crafting tutorial. Thankfully, this only set me back about fifteen minutes.

Visually, Cortopia leans into the comic-book art style with cel shading and sharply defined black edges that looks straight out of a panel of a TMNT comic. This aesthetic, closely resembling Men In Black: Most Wanted and Deadpool VR, is not for everyone, but everything is sharp with as much detail as this visual style will allow for. I did notice a lot of the collectible scrap would sometimes just float in midair for no reason, but that is the only visual flaw to bring up. The sound design generally gets the job done and the sound effects are particularly good during combat. The musical score is fine, but nothing memorable. The voice acting is excellent, even if a tad overbearing on coms at times.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City Final Verdict

Any issues I had with TMNT: Empire City were overcome by just how fun and breezy the game is to play. If I bumped into anything I didn’t care for, seconds later I was on to something else and did not care enough to dwell on it. The glitches I experienced were a nuisance, but easily overcome.

Cortopia never forgets that this property is based on a comic book that across forty years has not taken itself too seriously while entertaining fans of all ages. Empire City lives up to that standard. Longtime TMNT fans and newcomers alike will find something to like in Empire City.

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