The Backlog, Entry 4: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows

I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows

This is it: four weeks in and we’ve come to the first truly questionable purchase in my catalogue. I don’t know that I generally buy weird games, but I do sometimes buy horribly broken ones that have no business charging $15, let alone any money, for you to buy. Yes, I’m talking about Out of the Shadows. You might think that Mars: War Logs sets the standard for poorly made mid-tier games, but you’ve clearly not played this game, or ever read Dan Rykert’s review of it.

I went to see the latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film; a movie that the Internet had told me in no uncertain terms was an awful movie with no real redeeming features. I sat down in the theatre with one thought in my mind, “Surely this can’t be any worse than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III!” You know something? I was right! The movie actually ended up being pretty enjoyable, and to me it seems like it got beat up far more than it deserved in the court of public opinion. I mean, I could be wrong. I have a sort of blind spot when it comes to my TMNT.

This brings me quite neatly to Out of the Shadows. I had heard rumblings about it being a game in trouble: there was barely any marketing, nobody had played the game, the game came out and it was a broken mess, but I still went out and paid for the Steam version of it! There weren’t many options in terms of presentation or customization, but I dove in headfirst, ensorcelled by a series of slick pre-launch trailers promising Arkham-like combat and seamless 4 –player cooperative play.

What I got was visuals worthy of a solid B, a surprisingly stable framerate, some janky controls, and a completely broken online system. Also, the developer seems to have vanished from the face of the earth and never bothered fixing any of these problems. I played the game, beat the first Chapter solo, got to the final fight of the second Chapter, got killed because of a boss-fight glitch, and never played it again until I came back from seeing the new movie and thought to myself “Man, I am gonna give that game another shot!”

Well, apparently there was a patch released at some point, because the game controlled much more smoothly than I remember it doing when I first played, and the performance appears to have gotten even better on the PC. Online play is still all busted, though, so my main reason for getting the game (playing Raph to my brother’s Donnie and beatin’ up Foot Clan) remained unrealized. I went hunting around the Internet, searching for a solution to my online woes. Short of faking a LAN game through Hamachi, there wasn’t anything new in the wild. Desperate for my online Turtles fix, I turned to my 360, and discovered that they are selling this game for $5. This game is probably worth $5. That’s what, a quarter-twomp? It’s nothing.

So… the online works on the 360. That’s the one good thing I have to say. Otherwise, the performance is absolutely wretched; the framerate isn’t even at 30 fps enough to consider that the default; any time you and any other turtle attempt a team move or any time your turtle does a particularly flashy move the framerate stutters and probably drops to around 15, and there are some particle-heavy effects during an average fight. At some point, you will get caught on the world geometry, and if you’re lucky you’ll be able to get yourself unstuck. It’s a mess of a game.

But you know, when there are four of you (yes, there were actually two people other than my brother and I playing OOTS on a Saturday evening in the year of our Lord 2014) and the framerate hasn’t dipped and nobody has to do that shitty hacking minigame and you’re all fighting ninjas and Mousers, the game is pretty fun. It delivers on its premise fairly infrequently, but when it does, it’s totally great. It makes the horrible mess that the game is even worse because the potential is so blatantly there. It bummed me out.

I’ll probably keep playing it.

Me and my friends sort of enjoyed it despite fights being a blur when a team attack happened. However we jacked it in when the sewer level were thousands of mini robots come after you. I looked back were we had come out and a cutscene started...there they stared! 8 EYES! It was Raphael, Donatello, Michelangelo and Leonardo....but...we were them...on the other side of this gate. For some utterly unknown reason, the developers decided to duplicate the characters and have one set left behind. Almost as if a cutscene happens you switch into another set of the turtles. It was after that we also found the level design to be so poor we could not figure out were to go or what to do. Followed with our little enjoyment of the combat being destroyed.

It had potential.

Oh god yes, the signposting in this game is fucking garbage. Just the absolute worst level design I've seen in years. The PC runs considerably better than the 360 version, but without the ability to play co-op there doesn't really seem to be a point to it all. Playing this game is like taking a semi-pleasant walk, but with the knowledge that someone's going to kick you right in the balls at some point.