I wanted to love this game. I really did.

It's with quite a heavy heart do I give this game a dreaded thumbs down, but there's honestly one rather large reason why, and it can be summed up a simple sentence:

The game has no weight.

Firstly, let me get it out of the way that the 30fps nonsense and the co-op controversy does NOT bother me much. Go read other reviews to find out more about it. It definitely affects the choices of other players and other gamers, but I just happen to be one who doesn't mind 30fps nor have any friends, so the issue didn't really factor in! If it does or doesn't with you, that's also something to take note of, and something that other people can cover better than I.

But getting to the meat of it, weight (or the lack thereof) is something that can be applied to a lot of things in this game. Let's go through the nibblets one by one.

Gameplay:
Unlike every other one of Platinum's games, the fighting in this game feels hollow and lifeless. I'm not sure what it is, but there is this lack of a satisfying THUNK with every hit, almost as if things aren't even really connecting. Each slash and attack doesn't register with your senses, and were it not for individual life bars and body flashing, it'd be hard to tell that you did any damage at all. This is compared to other games in their history such as Bayonetta or Wonderful 101 or even Transformers where each punch, each special power and each defense carries a lot of, well, punch. I'm not entirely sure what's missing, but something is.

Story:
The story is also kinda weightless in the sense that there's really a lack of a single thread tying anything together. The first few stages (1 - 6) can be played in any order, which means that as far as a cohesive story matters, it's simply a case of 'fight here until the boss shows up and then fight him' in terms of the micro-story, and nothing more than 'the Foot is up to no good' as an over-arcing plot. Now, while this is not necessarily the worst thing, and there ARE a lot of games which are very good that don't rely at all on plot, it's just something that would have worked better in favour of this game specifically, since the game tries to pretend that it has one. Since the game isn't linear, they can't really write good intrigue into each chapter without it just being repetitious. So why bother? The work could have gone into making each chapter more self-contained, and have the game be about missions out there in the wild instead.

Stage Mechanics:
Stages sort of occur as follows:
- Go to area
- Do random stuff in area until boss is triggered
- Do boss
- Party tiems winrar
Now, the issue I have with this is the randomness of the 'random stuff'. The game is kinda unashamed at admitting that nothing really matters or has anything to do with the actual boss fight or plot of the stage itself, so the weightlessness comes in in this point with how redundant anything is. For example, in Rocksteady's stage, the 4 random 'quests' I had to do was carry 8 billion bars of gold across a platform with Sudden Death Lasers hindering me, deactivating 5 bombs in an area, and checking computers to find out where the Foot Clan was not once but twice in two seperate events. None of these have anything really to do with the actual story. Checking computers, alright. Sure. But the randomness of it (since the computers literally just spawn into the ground rather than being in intelligent locations) makes it feel like a slap-dash job with no real forethought. Also, carrying gold? The delivery point was literally just across the platform, and the only reason why it's difficult is because lasers suddenly come out from NOWHERE to hinder you just for that one sequence, and then you leave the gold on the floor at the other end and it's okay, I guess. Why is there gold being stolen in the subway, even?
While I admit the randomness actually does give a really fun feel of a 'living' world, it was just not implemented on any meaningful scale to me, and I found myself distracted by it more than having fun.
Besides, the big joke is, once I finally HAD used the computers to 'pinpoint' the location of the Foot activity, it just turned off a laser door that was the first thing I saw in the entire stage and said to myself 'there's something behind there'. The game is far too dumb for itself, and Platinum has known to be a lot smarter. Something got into the water, and it must have been old pizza.

Voice Acting:
Is terrible. Is hollow. None of them sound like they mean what they say. There is a line when one of the turtles dies that is horrendously delivered. It is a stutter where each single syllable is prounounced as if it were its own word. This is weightless because you don't feel like the actors mean it. There's no oomph. There's no flair, and no style. It's terrible.

Visual Style:
Actually this one's pretty freaking nice. I have no problems with it whatsoever.

Control:
Outside of the fact that hits don't feel like they hurt, the game controls pretty good, really! So again, I have nothing to say, and this is a big plus in my book. Oh yeah, they run really slow, though. Doesn't feel like they're moving fast at all.

Fighting Mechanics:
This one's weird. This one is a negative in my book, but not because of lack of trying. I like the idea of using all four turtles. What I DON'T like is how complicated it is to use them. Each has their own inventory and load out, which is cool. Each has their own fighting style, and way of doing things, which is ALSO cool. ALL FOUR SWARM YOUR SCREEN LIKE IDIOTS, which is not cool. Quite a lot of the time, I find myself not really having to do much since my cool bros do everything for me. Setting the AI to just hang around turns them into bricks, in a way that they don't really do anything at all. The game, unfortunately, is balanced for the swarm, since there are infinitely-spawning enemies who try to swarm you back, and certain enemies and bosses have unfairly huge life bars to make up for it. The game wasn't built around the idea of you being a turtle fighting. It was centered around the idea of you playing a team, AS a team (sorta wonderful 101 style) but it didn't really work out. Individual action is confused with action of the group, and in places where it should be handled as a group, it doesn't, such as life gain. You get one new 'pip' of life for every 500 points of score you earn while in a level (which resets to default every time you start a new level), but it only applies to the turtle you're controlling at the time. So if you favour one, he gets a load more life and others trail behind. Yet, when you fight by yourself, you EASILY get swarmed by certain types of units, such as those chain-ninjas that basically spam and lock you up. A lot of in-game actions take a heck of a long time to complete too, upwards of 20 seconds by my estimate, and your AI buddies need to keep enemies at bay.

But at the same time, you can switch between any of the turtles on the fly, which don't share life gain, but DO share item usage (I think? Maybe not even then!), and... it's kinda confusing if the game is supposed to be a character action game or a characters actions games with too many plurals.

Final thoughts:
I bought this game because I like TMNT games, and Platinum is cool. However, it doesn't mean they can't sometimes make mistakes. Everyone has to, once in a while, and sometimes our favourite franchises are sorely mishandled. I've already refunded this game to purchase Transformers Devastation again on this computer because it's far, far better. I appreciate Platinum for trying, but if there's anything I can say about this game, it's the shiniest movie tie-in game that I actually know of (since the TMNT movie is coming out soon, eh!)

Well, they tried. And so did I. And so should you, if you like TMNT. But don't expect anything more than just a polished pile of steaming hope.

I really want to like TMNT:MiM. It's made by Platinum, it's a turtles game, it has freaking ARMAGON in it. So why is this not a recommendation?

Combat feels...weird.

You're always accompanied by three AI controlled turtles, who are always fully involved in all combat. This makes fighting in general very unorganised and chaotic. The enemy AI has four targets to randomly pick from, targets you might be trying to attack get knocked away by another turtle, and generally I can't really tell whether I'm really contributing a lot since everything is just chaos.

Combat itself incentivises the use of your special abilities and discourages actual light/heavy attack combos. All the specials give you a ton of iFrames, do heavy damage and attack several foes at once. Your normal attacks on the other hand are disproportionately weaker, rarely ever stagger anything, have odd hitboxes and generally lack "oomph" to feel satisfying. I felt like I'm supposed to chain burst all my specials and then try to get a parry/back attack in while I wait for the specials to go off cooldown again. That being said, the dodge/parry/block system is great and feels very rewarding while being not too strong due to the "dizzy bar".

Boss fights suffer a lot from the chaotic combat system. I only fought Bebop and Armagon, but both pretty much ignored me and only targeted my allies, leaving me free to give them a nice back massage with Donny's staff. Until the other turtles got KO'd and I had to actually pay attention for a minute or two, then they respawned. And this cycle is inevitable, since their AI does not seem to move out of the red death-telegraphs, ever. On top of this, the bosses are so-so. Bebop felt nice and unique, with a couple of interesting attacks that required me to employ adequate counter measures, like coverding the floor in explosives so I had to carefully pick a safe gap between the explosions or climb up on some balconies. But Armagon is a terribly shallow one-trick-pony. Obviously I can not comment on the other bosses. I would probably like them a lot more if there was the option to be permanently alone and not have the boss' attention taken away by my endlessly respawning fodder-friends.

Level design reminds me a whole lot of No More Heroes. In both NMH and TMNT:MiM you roam a sort of open map and do little "side jobs" or events until you unlock the right to attend a boss fight. Here, you're beating up small groups of enemies, collecting loot on a timer, destroy rampaging cars or try to survive for a set amount of time against infinite respawns. Most of these events felt alright and they didn't repeat in the two levels I played, but they weren't particularly thrilling either. With the boss battles falling kind of flat, I can't really let this game get away with the tedium-foreplay like NMH, though.

On the positive side, optimisation is amazing. My toaster-esque old laptop runs this game really nicely at medium settings without significant performance problems, and it looks pretty alright (if you like the art style of course). The frame lock is inconvenient, but for me it's not the absolute gamebreaker everyone and their dog seem to perceive nowadays. The four turtles don't play like carbon copies, but they're not vastly different either. They convey their intended character through chatter and cutscenes nicely, although Mikey being the bottom joke in absolutely every single cutscene I've seen gets old fast. Combat controls feel decent, but as I said, gameplay itself is chaotic and burst-oriented. The level up system seems to offer some replayability, as do the three initial +1 unlockable difficulty settings.


Sadly, steam reviews are binary. I'd much rather give TMNT:MiM a "give it a try and refund if combat doesn't click for you" than a thumbs down. It's not a bad game in my opinion, but it doesn't provide the kind of gameplay I was looking for.

For people who were waiting on a good TMNT game to come out, this isnt going to be the one. I would even say that the game is guilty of false advertisement with Platinum Games' claim of skipping the local-coop in order to get the 60FPS target. However, that's the least of this game's issues. While there are a few good ideas going of it, TMNT: Mutants in Manhattan not only feels rushed with little to no thought into its gameplay, but also manages to be so unompimized making this game run worse than Korra.



Pros:
-The 4 turtles play different from one another with their own individual moveset players can customize
-Challenging difficulty levels is that one could expect from Platinum Games
-There is some variety to the missions in each level before reaching the boss fights
-The IDW artstyle helps to bring some style into the game

Cons:
-The game feels unoptimized with some bugs present which might crash the game in some cases
-No local-coop
-Game is locked at 30FPS
-False Advertisement with the devs claiming that they had to leave out local-coop to imply to keep the 60FPS target
-Boss fights can drag on to a point where it can over stay its welcome
-While there are some decent gameplay mechanics, with all 4 turtles going at it either playing by yourself or online, everything turns out to be too much of a mess to keep up on whats going on to a point where theres almost no thought to the gameplay
-A number of the missions are just too tedious to do
-Estimated playthough is to be around 4-6 hours




Vertict: I give this game is a big NO recommendation to this game. Simply put: avoid this title. Its not worth spending the $40 price tag ( or even half price for that matter ) for a title that runs worse than Korra. Ontop of the uninspiring gameplay excecution and how the game is unoptimized, Platinum Games should be ashamed of the false advertisement about the 60FPS. Your money is better spend on any other Platinum Game title available on Steam. I would go as far as to say that even Korra tops over this game. With that said, I dont fully blame Platinum Games since most of their titles had much higher standards and are more well recieved. Hopefully they can completely drop Activision as their publisher and move on to a better company that will allow Platinum to put more development time on their future titles instead of just rushing out as a sort of quick cash grab.

+IDW Art Style
+The moveset of the turtles and gameplay mechanics are solid
+Return of 80s and 90s Turtle Villains
+Level objectives are randomized for replayability
+Voice acting and dialogue

-Only a story mode, nothing else
-Story mode has only 8 levels (half of which re-use the locations of previous levels)
-Medium difficulty is annoyingly easy, but the jump to hard difficulty is extreme when you start out
-Cutscenes are locked to an oddly low resolution
-Lazy and repetetive level design
-Levels clearly feel like they should be played multiplayer, leaving single player a little soulless
-Online co-op community is non-existent

Conclusion:
I’ll keep playing myself, but find it pretty hard to recommend TMNT: MiM to anyone but the die hard, TMNT fan (or someone who knows they already have a few friends who own the game to co-op with). Having couch co-op could have been the saving grace for this game, but as it stands Mutants in Manhattan might be even less fun than the sub-par TMNT Out of the Shadows game, and a 6/10 at best.

I don't understand all the hate this game is getting, as a big fan of the IDW comic book and classic TMNT games such as Turtles In Time, I find that Mutants In Manhattan ticks all the right boxes. With all the negative reviews it's receiving I'm not entirely sure what people were expecting of it. It's typical Platinum fare with an emphasis on combat though admittedly it's a little lacking in depth compared to their previous titles, but to me it represents a modernisation of the classic beat 'em up genre which is where it delivers completely, this is the kind of game I would have pumped coins into back in the days of arcades only to return to play week after week.

The presentation in Mutants In Manhattan is amazing, the turtles have never looked better and Platinum have clearly taken time to incorporate characters and lore from all of the various TMNT series, though the game clearly takes most of it's cues from the IDW run which is to it's benefit as I consider that to be the best iteration of the turtles yet. The boss battles are fun though I would like to have seen more of them, it would have been great to go up against Alopex or The Rat King but the bosses we do get are represented perfectly, especially Bebop and Rocksteady. Perhaps my only real problem with the game is the lack of Casey Jones as he's always been my favourite character and it would have been a blast to have him fighting alongside the turtles and indulging some playful banter with Raph and April.

All in all Mutants In Manhattan is a great little game if you take it for what it is. If you're a fan of old school beat 'em ups you can't really go wrong, consider it is as a modern version of Turtle's In Time and you'll definitely have a blast with it.

Pros:
- Voice acting is 10/10, they did a great job on that one and it feels just like the (nickelodeon) cartoon, which is a good one.
- Animations are nice.
- Boss fights are fun and challenging, on Hard mode.


Cons:
- Boss fights are slow and easy, on Normal mode.

- Game levels have a poor, shallow design where you just go to the next objective and start the random-quest "kill all enemies" or "defend this spot" or "bring x to y", which gets old after 5 minutes. The levels are seriously bad, expecially the sewer ones. You eventually reach the stage boss which is the fun part, I guess.<
Well, ok, I had fun with the Megakrang stage. But still.

- Difficulty balance is very bad. If you enjoy playing on hard like I do, this game is gonna get tediously annoying and completely not fun by the time the only enemies are rock soldiers. In fact, all difficulty does is increasing enemy HP, decreasing yours, and giving you 1 less continue. Which is fine, mind you, it's just not cool when it's designed so poorly that it will take you forever to kill a bunch of rock soldiers in a quest on a later stage on hard mode.
You might argue you need to level up to play hard mode, but that's not it.

- Music is just bad, boring, repetitive. It gets kinda exciting during boss fights, but that's it.

- Ok what the heck is wrong with the character design? haha, with the exception of raphael, every turtle's face makes you wanna punch them. Just look at Donatello's face, he has that round nose thing that just kills the mood.

Conclusion: I am a TMNT fan (who isn't?) but this game feels lazy and rushed. If the stages were actually good, and the missions any fun, and if it was designed/balanced properly, then it would've been a good game. A very, very good game in fact.

Don't get this at Fullprice.

I'm a fan of Platinum games and this game is a disapointment.

I really liked Legend of Korra for what it was and Transfomers was great
But this game is the weakest Platinum game I'v played and considering Korra was $15 and this is $40 that's just sad.

There is no Combo move list and your weapons just feel weak.
The Specal moves aren't that great and the cool downs are too long.

It's not balanced for single player since Your Partner AI's are Terrible
During the first boss they just took shots and didn't avoid bombs so they just died over and over again.

I expcet better from Platinum Games.

As a fan of the Ninja Turtles series since I was only a kid, I heard about Platinum making a game based on the series I thought it was a match made in heaven. And after I completed the game, this is what I felt afterwards:

Conflicted.

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with this game. Why? Here's why:

As a guy that loves to cause chaos in certain games or be in the centre of chaos, this is way too much. Too much goes on and it is hard to keep track of it all.

The controls on this are wierd. Like with every hit with a nunchuck, bo-staff, sai blades and katanas, I don't feel the impact of them. The guard button doesn't do this much justice as it also serves as a dodge and counter. But running, grinding and gliding feel decent plus the boss battles are the most enjoyable you'll be able to get out of this game.

The voice acting makes me feel like I'm watching some type of spin on the series, which is nice. Although, hearing the turtles thank each other and say their one-liners (which are very few) gets tiring as hell.

I haven't tried the multiplayer since I was slightly intimidated by it thinking that I would jump into a very hard game, but I would have liked to try this with friends.

The characters look great with the cell-shaded style that Transformers Devastation had but the levels aren't that interesting. You got your typical city, sewer and krang alien hidey-hole levels to go through. There's also these 'side-quests' you have to do to reach the boss of each stage and they range from fighting a group of enemies, finding a hideout, defusing bombs and downloading intel, which is fine and all if it wasn't for the fact that there is so much of them.



Overall, I give this a 7/10. It's alright as a beat-em up and a Platinum game. I would recommend waiting until a price drop on this (or if you have a console) buy a pre-owned copy of the game. But if you want a pure Platinumgames experience, buy either Bayonetta, Anarchy Reigns, MGR Revengeance or even Transformers Devastation. I might throw Legend of Korra in there if you crave for more.

tl;dr: you are gonna be disappointed if you expect this one to be one of those Platinum quality action titles. The elements adapted from the original are fine, but the core mechanics feel rushed and unpolished.

Speaking of a disappointment...errrrr
I love Platinum Games, I love TMNT, I tried to love this one, but I just can't.

I love Bayonetta. Bayonetta is the type of game that looks totally chaotic during every single battle, but everything are still managable and under the players' control, and all the rewards gained from skilled play go right to the players themselves. That's the reason why traditional action games are so addictive for the players who are willing to spend some extra time to dig into the game: we, as players, are achiving everything, and it feels like it.

In the case of TMNT:MiM, everything still looks chaotic but...not really under my control. When my AI allies just run right into the crowds of enemies, I hardly stand a chance to pull of even a single complete set of combo without missing one or two slashes, then everything ends when you haven't even figured out what is going on on the screen. While the dodge system is still a thing this time around, the reward couldn't justify the precision demanded to pull it off. Enemy's attack indicators(both visual and sound) are inconsistent and difficult to read especially in the middle of a chaotic battle, and the camera angle can even make it worse in some indoor sequences.

Something new for Platinum action games are implemented in this game for sure, like the open world design, but the idea overall is poorly executed and the set pieces just simply doesn't work with each other. I appreciate the art direction they have taken, but the environment of the levels doesn't have a lot of variety by each one of themselves, and they can feel bland and samey over time easily since you often have to spend some time explore around these levels. The quests are usually series of fetch quests, which I wouldn't even bother to talk about.

This game is far away from those actually demanding traditional action game titles, so 30fps is totally playable. However, with this level of graphical technologies implemented, this level of performance just couldn't be justified, despite the fact that the team mentioned that it would be targeting 60fps on all platforms. The fps is still capped even you turn off v-sync is straight up stupid.

What bugs me the most is the prerendered cutscenes. They look no better than the actual gameplay from a technical perspective which means they can totally be replaced by real-time rendering, and the cutscenes themselves have constant noticeable frame dips. Such level of unpolishedness just couldn't justify its price tag.

But there are still some upsides: the writing is still what you can expect from TMNT, the characters are there, and the facial expressions of the turtles during the cutscenes are really impressive.

I'd give this a thumbs sideways if I could. Actual combat is fun enough, and probably way better with other people. The combat system feels like a watered-down version of God Hand. It makes ense I guess. There are now 4 players in the game instead of just the player you're controlling, so a lot of stuff is going on.

But I just want to touch on a few negatives real quick with the game:

There's no local co-op.

Leel design is pretty bad. At times, I wasn't sure where I was even supposed to go. Even so, the levels don't offer anything really interesting. I think it would've made more sense to have the game be 2D instead. Each level feels like you just walk around looking for guys to beat up until the game tells you a boss is coming.

And then there's some weird issue with the game menu. Everytime I would change the game resolution or a few other display options, my game would lock up. I'd hit ctr + alt + delete and the game wold unfreeze. But this was a consistent problem.

Oh, I was also getting some weird graphical glitch in the game. On the left side of my screen I would have a vertical line running down the side. I think it had something to do with me changing the game to full screen, but the game not completely realizing this.

- The game is not bad. It just should be way better than it is. Combat is fun, and probably a blast with friends. Unfortunately, there's no local co-op.