Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows is an action beat 'em up from studio Red Fly Studio that tried to revive the classic Turtles brawler genre for modern consoles with an emphasis on cooperative play for up to four players. The game takes place in New York's sewers and streets, where the four fighting turtles face off against the Foot Clan, its leader Shredder, and other iconic villains from the world of Ninja Turtles.

The combat system builds on a combination of light and heavy strikes, dodges, and special abilities of the individual turtles, each of whom has a different fighting style depending on their weapon — katana, sai, nunchaku, or bo staff — and their own set of unlockable combo attacks. The game features character upgrades using experience points and the unlocking of new abilities and cosmetic extras, which was meant to give players motivation to repeatedly play through the levels in multiplayer and experiment with different team compositions. Visually, the title chose a darker, more realistic style of rendering the characters compared to the more traditional cartoonish look, which caused mixed reactions among part of the fanbase already at the time of the announcement, although later adjustments brought the look somewhat closer to a more classic take on the turtles.

On the technical side, the game struggled with a number of issues at launch, including unstable frame rates and crashes, especially in cooperative mode, which significantly marred its reception among critics and players alike. The studio tried to address the situation with subsequent patches, but the game's image in players' memory remained tied mainly to its launch woes rather than to the otherwise solid foundation of its combat system and its faithfulness to the comic and TV source material. Today it's seen as a missed opportunity to revive the turtle-brawler genre for a new generation of players, one that a more technically polished version would likely have received much more warmly, especially considering how much care the studio put into the combat itself and the design of the individual sewer and city rooftop levels.