I didn’t believe Lucio when he pointed out in our group chat that Mutants In Manhattan had been released on Tuesday. There was no real fanfare for the game, just a sparse few posts on social media from Platinum and Activision. Releasing on the same day as Overwatch certainly doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the product, and I wasn’t terribly surprised when the clerk at the store I purchased the game from had to pull three toppling stacks of Overwatch from their cabinet before he was able to find his single copy of TMNT.
I had initially been optimistic about a marriage between TMNT and Platinum, a studio that at the very least can generally deliver on the action front. Sure the world was still recovering from the wounds left behind after the abysmal Legend of Korra game. But that gigantic flop also inspired some confidence. Maybe after Korra’s terrible reception they would actually spend the proper time and money to make Mutants In Manhattan worth its price tag. Four hours later, after completing the game it’s not hard to see why someone might have been inclined to hide it in the middle of Overwatch week.
Krang, Shredder, and a host of other TMNT baddies are back, and they’ve got a uh…plan..to…invade uh…Earth? Sure! And now it’s up to our four heroes in halfshells to kick their butts clear back to Dimension X. Each of the game’s 9 stages takes a Mega Man approach by assigning a particular boss to it. It even goes a step further by letting you do the middle levels in whatever order you please and by awarding you with skills unique to each boss upon completion. Whoa now, don’t get too excited there partner, while Platinum has done an admirable job curating bosses from the TMNT back catalog, getting to, and fighting them, is for all intents and purposes a miserable experience.
Before taking on each level’s boss the Turtles will have to complete a small collection of missions. Potential mission objectives are few and far between, they basically boil down to the following options: defeat all the enemies, protect the pizza stand or ATM (yes, ATM), defuse the bombs (or hack enemy intel devices) scattered throughout the map, carry (or ride) an item to a designated target, and stand in a designated spot before the timer runs out. Remember surfing through the sewers in Turtles In Time and beating up the Foot Clan in a fast paced exciting brawl? Yeah well fuck you. Now slowly carry this pile of gold bars to the other side of a subway station while being attacked by an unlimited stock of spawning enemies.
Combat is repetitive and chaotic to the point of excess. There is way too much happening on screen for you to effectively follow the action. Luckily unlike other Platinum games you don’t have to be particularly good at combat to excel at it. Each Turtle has a set of four special moves called “Ninjitsus”. These abilities can be swapped out before each stage and do anything from combo attacks to healing your party. They also have cooldowns. Your AI partners will use skills periodically but most of your time spent in combat will be seeing which turtles have unused skills and switching to them while you wait for the rest to reset.
The Ninjitsu system also highlights one of my biggest gripes about the game: all of the Turtles feel the same. Donatello might have more reach than Raphael but it’s barely noticeable in the heat of battle. There could have been a nice opportunity for some character in the “Ninjitsu” system but those skills are all identical between the Turtles. You can effectively create your own classes, giving some characters healing and support abilities while perhaps gearing others up for all out assault, but it’s sad to see four diverse personalities and weapon sets effectively squandered.
Curiously Mutants In Manhattan runs at 30 FPS, which is odd when juxtaposed with the game’s lackluster cell shaded graphics. The game is even locked to 30 FPS on PC despite the fact that it looks like a Wii U could run two copies of this at once without trouble. Brawling enthusiasts might be worried about the FPS cut but as I mentioned earlier, the game’s insipid gameplay will have you more worried about skill cooldowns than dodging and parrying attacks. In fact by the end of my initial playthrough I had achieved an S-Rank on a majority of the levels. I’m not sure how exactly the game is calculating skill but I would frequently land S-ranks, sometimes even on encounters where I nearly wiped.
There will certainly be outrage about the game’s meager runtime but if you ask me the whole thing is mercifully short. The real tragedy is that it’s not even a four hour game, it’s a two hour game stretched to four hours. You’ll be encountering duplicate missions by the second stage, and duplicate levels by the third. There’s a tragically small amount of recorded dialogue, and so the Turtles and April will be repeating the same two or three lines for most of the game. Even the music is oddly brief, rather than featuring full compositions it seems like most of the game’s music is just 15-30 second loops on an endless repeat. Oh and let’s not forget my least favorite extension method: repeating every single boss in one of the game’s penultimate levels.
As I landed the last blow on the final boss the game gave me a nice hard crash to the PS4 dashboard, forcing me to play the level again. The only reason I slogged through the whole thing a second time was just to see whether or not it would crash again. I didn’t need to see the ending. You don’t either, you can just guess what happens and you’ll probably be right.
On the surface a dull Ninja Turtle game isn’t anything special, this is an IP that nobody has really known what to do with for years. Still it’s unfortunate to see a developer so clearly perfect for the series botch an attempt so badly. I don’t know whether or not Mutants In Manhattan is worse than Legend of Korra, but at least that game had the good sense to only ask for fifteen dollars. At $40 for a digital download and $50 for a boxed copy this game ascends from bargain bin junk to a flat out insult. I’d call the game “hot trash” but there’s a small chance you might find something you can eat in a garbage bin.
