At the PAX East PlayStation booth, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan was a playable demo. We had a chance to demo the game, and here are our thoughts and gameplay impressions:
Mutants in Manhattan
There were two options for playable demos: (1) the Bebop battle as seen in earlier gameplay trailers; and (2) a Karai-based demo where the Turtles have to diffuse bombs and defeat Foot Ninjas. We described some of the details of the PAX East demo in an earlier article, and now we will discuss gameplay.
From our impression, the cut scenes and voice acting is very well done. The game retains the charm of Turtle humor present in the current Nickelodeon cartoon, while still paying homage to the IDW comic book art style. The fight scenes are a lot of fun and the Turtles have plenty of unique moves. Swapping between Turtles is seamless and quick, and interesting enough, there was a noticeable difference between playing as a single Turtle during a fight scene versus swapping Turtles frequently. By swapping Turtles, there are always charged abilities to be used, so it seems to be much more advantageous to swap quickly and stack as many powerful moves as possible.
The mechanics of the game are really smooth. There did not appear to be any problems during fight scenes with hit registration or anything of the like. It is simple to traverse vertically and horizontally throughout the map, which was reminiscent to some of the older Amazing Spider-Man games.
There were only a few negative things I have to say about the game. First, the lack of couch-coop seems to be bothering a lot of fans, and many people standing in line for the game were complaining about this fact. It is important to note that there is still online coop, so you can still fight bad guys with your friends. Second, it is occasionally quite difficult to figure out where your next objective is in the game. With more gameplay experience or familiarity with the world map, this problem may be eliminated, but I definitely struggled trying to figure out where to go. Lastly, some of the user interface is not very intuitive. At certain times, specific items have a small icon hovering above them indicating it was possible to interact with the item, and unbeknownst to some players, that indicator icon was actually a direction to “press the circle button”. Although these were minor problems, we still very much enjoyed the gameplay.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan will be released May 24th, 2016. If you are interested in preordering the game, be aware of the DLC bonuses offered by retailers.
