Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows

Out of the Shadows is no Game of the Year nominee, but it's a lot of fun to smack your way through the five-hour campaign and play the Arcade mode with friends. And for those of us old enough to remember the Turtles' original incarnation, it's a trip down memory lane, too.

With enough effort and perseverance, one can glean battles from Out of the Shadows that feel truer to TMNT than any you've ever fought, and that might be enough for superfans to look the other way on its technical and control problems.

Intrinsic problems with some of the basics; collision detection, dodgy camera, and sloppy graphics ruin what could have been a far more polished experience.

Patchy. It suffers from bugs that see you teleporting from one place to another, graphical glitches, unfortunate design decisions, and poor level design. On the upside the arcade game is so good it should have been its own game.

There’s just not enough cowabunga in this undercooked game. [11/2013, p.84]

TMNT is a video game of poor production values​​, valid only for the die-hard fan of Pizza-loving turtles.

Out of the Shadows is yet another bad Ninja Turtles game. Between the game's loud and ugly UI and the glitches, bugs, and general sloppiness, there's only enough hope for the good intentions to improve next time.

TMNT: Out of the Shadows is a game that promised a lot but fell short of the epic experience that the fans were waiting for. The dialog's lack charm and quickly turns old and repetitive, coop drop in/drop out is frustrating, and AI is clumsy and weak. Even though our favorite masked reptiles look great, Out of the Shadows just doesn't cut it as a TMNT game.

If it had greater enemy variety and required players to utilize their full arsenal of abilities – and if its technical issues were ironed out – it might have really been something special.

Out of the Shadows, sadly, only flirts with these past triumphs. Heavy flirting, maybe, but it’s too badly built of a game to live up to its strong potential.

If Turtles are your thing, you might want to put aside the concerns for the bugs and pull down the demo from Xbox Live. It is more than playable, just don’t expect to have a smooth ride. On the other hand, the story is light but so is the source material – it would have been nice to see episodic content come out for an otherwise compelling realization of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

In theory this could be an entertaining coop brawler. But it lacks in technical quality, variety and esprit. “Kowabunga” alone doesn’t cut it.

Despite the brevity and repetition, plenty of bugs plague these turtles. From low-level quirks like characters getting caught on objects in the environment, to high-level issues like A.I. partners abandoning us or a hacking minigame causing freezes, the amount of glitches in Out of the Shadows is pretty alarming.

Out of the Shadows has all the trimmings of a fantastic brawler, but none of it works as it should. For every highlight the game showcases there are multiple failures: shoddy controls, a complicated combat system, and far too many glitches.

It may have a few good ideas, but all of them are poorly executed.

Aside from about fifteen minutes of nostalgia and the title screen, there really is no need to play this game unless you are some kind of sadist. It pains me to say this, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time is still the last great TMNT game.

What we are left with is a dull, broken button-masher of a campaign, a risible, barely playable multiplayer game, and a couch co-op which puts most players on a level playing field with Mr. Magoo.

Activision is wasting good potential with this unfinished mess of a Turtles game. It isn't even worth the time of trying out the demo.

Game-breaking glitches and a poor camera make TMNT: Out of the Shadows a bruised and battered shell of what it could have been.

How can such a bad game be part of the Summer of Arcade? Those games need to be special. This Turtles game is definitely not.

Inexcusable glitches, unresponsive controls, broken combat, bizarre gameplay design (hacking games, really?), unfair enemies and completely unnecessary loading times make for a monumental disappointment.

There seem to be the beginnings of some good ideas in TMNT: Out of the Shadows, but none of them are properly fleshed out. Instead, these shortcomings are simply covered up with more half-followed-through mechanics, resulting in a mess of a game.

To be a turtle trapped in a game this bad is a truly wretched fate...The game barely functions on a basic level.

Avoid like you would a corpse flower. [Nov 2013, p.95]

Terrible, and offers nothing as a video game or even as a piece of nostalgia. The ugly turtle models didn’t bring back any memories of the fun cartoon of my youth, and the gameplay is among the most unenjoyable experiences I’ve had during my time as a gamer. There is no circumstance under which anyone should play this train wreck of a game.

Ninja Turtles are back from hell with their new TV show. But if the expectations for a well-crafted game were high, everything went wrong. Graphics, animations, bugs... the game reminded us of the poorest hours of the bad videogame age. Turtles fans, keep your memories from Turtles in Time on Super NES, it's clearly another dimension.