Running around a big city as you and your buds fight off ninjas, annihilate slices of pizza, and leap from rooftop to rooftop sounds like a perfect premise for a VR game, so it’s a pretty big bummer to see such a radical idea miss the mark in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City. This flawed adventure isn’t without charm – hanging out with friends as anthropomorphic turtles is consistently funny, and the parkour elements that have you dashing across skyscrapers are pretty strong. But, like a pie that’s too light on toppings, Empire City just doesn’t hit the spot in the ways it needs to. With weak combat, thin quests that quickly outstay their welcome, and an impressive amount of bugs, this flimsy six-hour adventure left me disappointingly shell-shocked.
Before we dive into the ways Empire City is often underwhelming, it’s at least worth celebrating one area where it rarely let me down: the writing. True to the shockingly consistent track record of the series, the dialogue in Empire City is quite good, with some very amusing one-liners and loads of punchy banter from our cold-blooded adolescents. That said, you’ll be hearing many of those funny lines a whole lot, and the repetition weighing down so much of this shelled romp applies to its jokes as well. Even the best joke is far less funny the 12th time you hear it.
The story itself is less interesting than the dialogue, too, with a grab bag of TMNT characters doing exactly what you’d expect them to do with zero deviations. Bebop and Rocksteady are altogether unthreatening and goofy partners in crime, Karai serves as a morally gray companion with a murky history, and April O’Neil is just doing her best as she lives out her life as a sewer dweller. Your familiar group of allies conspires to thwart the telegraphed machinations of some tired foes in a forgettable story that is already quickly fading from my memory (and I rolled credits mere minutes before writing this).
When it comes to the fantasy of playing as the Ninja Turtles, the part Empire City gets closest to nailing is the parkour. Though its three open-world areas are quite limited, leaping across rooftops and climbing pipe drains as you hunt down the Foot Clan is definitely a highlight. Jumping, dashing in midair, and grapple hooking are all pretty stellar movement options early on, and you start to feel like even more of a badass once you unlock upgrades like a double jump, making yourself impossible to hit as you pull off daring stunts to get around town. Climbing and leaping through the air are two of the things that VR adventure games are best known for, and while Empire City doesn’t come close to some of the greats like Stride or Blade & Sorcery, it’s still more than serviceable and is certainly one of the best parts of this particular VR package.
Those parkour chops are wasted on the levels, though, which are the least interesting (and often most downright annoying) parts of Empire City. The three miniature hubs (East Side, Chinatown, and the Docks) are barren and charmless cityscapes you’ll revisit over the course of your adventure as you’re encouraged to participate in the same handful of extremely simple activities that pop up over and over again every few minutes. The idea here is that there’s always some minor crime to stop, similar to Insomniac’s Spider-Man games, and that you’ve also got regions to free from the Foot Clan’s control, similar to something like a Far Cry game. But Empire City’s versions of those ideas are incredibly underdeveloped and poorly executed, as you’re repeatedly sent the same small number of side quests ad nauseum with almost no payoff for completing them – and your reward for liberating each part of the city is for absolutely all of them to return to Foot Clan control the second you turn your back for longer than a few minutes. That means you’ll spend a pretty big chunk of the main story doing consistently boring and occasionally irritating chores.
There are a few things that make these open-world hubs slightly more bearable, such as time trials that ask you to do things like sink basketball shots into a hoop, throw ninja stars at moving targets, or collect floating letters Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater-style (minus the skateboard, despite how fitting that would have been). While completely unnecessary and devoid of any rewards that I could see, these serve as welcome distractions that inject just the tiniest bit of variety into otherwise incredibly tedious areas. There are also a couple collectibles hidden around to hunt for, some of which are just fun to track down for vanity reasons, like the chess pieces that you’ll need to complete your chess board back at your base, or the items and blueprints that actually have an impact on gameplay. These things go a small way toward making each region less annoying to spend time in, but only just so.
It certainly doesn’t help that you’ll have to do a whole lot of extremely sloppy fights along the way. No matter which of the four turtles you’re playing as, combat is an absurdly one-dimensional process of slashing, dashing out of the way, and repeating. There’s the smallest amount of variety beyond that, like the use of gadgets every now and again or a “Focus Mode” that lets you do a bit more damage, and the latter does help you get through the slog of combat a bit faster. But attacks often sail right through enemies without doing a lick of damage, blocking and parrying is pretty inconsistent, and sometimes a fight will just lock up altogether so you can’t hit anything with your weapons no matter how long you sit there and swing them. It doesn’t really matter all that much when death simply respawns you nearby with no progress lost, but it’s still such a letdown to not be stoked about the fighting in a dang Ninja Turtles game.
You can also sneak around and attack enemies from the cover of darkness like a true ninja, which at least saves you the trouble of having to contend with the combat’s shortcomings, but this method comes with plenty of caveats of its own. It’s much less obnoxious to just bop most enemies on the head from behind and keep on trucking, but you’re allowed to get away with quite a bit – you can almost walk right out in front of people without being detected, and enemies scarcely seem to notice when you incapacitate their friends with ninja stars right in front of them, allowing you to pick them all off in short order. It’s pretty rough, especially when both melee combat and stealth in VR have been done so well in plenty of other games, including fellow hero simulator Batman Arkham VR.
Throughout your adventure, you’ll collect the one thing that makes all Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles more powerful – trash, of course – and use it to level up your character, unlock upgrades, and craft consumables like smoke bombs and healing items. Although the actual means of acquiring this trash involves a whole lot of smashing crates, as well as the repetitive side quests with the lame combat that dominate Empire City, unlocking all the goodies that make your turtle a better warrior is actually pretty gratifying. Giving yourself a double jump, the ability to detect nearby collectibles, or even just more health are all worthy things to invest in.
It’s especially neat that each turtle levels up in different ways according to their personality, like how Raphael gains more health and does more damage by default, while Donatello gains more slots for tech upgrades as the resident “does machines” guy. It’s a bit of a letdown, though, that any resources spent investing in one character don’t carry over to a different turtle if you want to switch. After playing the first hour as Donatello, I wanted to try out some of the others only to find I’d have to start their progression over from scratch, which meant I spent the vast majority of my playtime locked into a single character when I would have preferred to mix it up as I went.
Even when the action let me down, Empire City’s most redeeming quality is that you can play it with up to three friends at once, and watching your buds be silly looking turtles doesn’t get old. The fact that the faces match the expressions you’re making and your mouth flops open cartoonishly when you talk is a nice touch, but even just shooting hoops back at the sewer base or seeing who can complete a time trial in the open world faster makes these otherwise forgettable tasks more memorable. In the same way that party games or other recent co-op contenders are only as good as the company you keep, Empire City does at least set itself up to be really entertaining if you’ve brought the right group along for the ride. Plus, you can get through the bland combat quicker by working as a team, and thus spend more time on the worthwhile pursuit of having impromptu dance battles.
Of all the issues Empire City has, the biggest by far is how inconsistently it works on the technical side of things. For a game that takes only six hours to complete, it’s pretty remarkable how many times it broke on me. One time I was unable to pick up any consumable items, while another it stopped letting me interact with the hacking minigame I needed to do to progress, and another still it straight up didn’t check off critical mission objectives after I completed them, forcing me to reboot and start again. Worst of all, if you run into any issues that force you to restart the mission or close the program in any way, you’ll lose all your progress since mission objectives are normally not saved until you’ve completed them. When I was 20 minutes into a quest and ran into a critical bug, I had to start that entire mission from scratch and just about chucked my headset out of the window.
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