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.
