Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate review

Let’s face it – the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are amazingly versatile. Building on their comic, toy line, and animated series, Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Raphael made their interactive debut in a NES beat ‘em up. Largely, success followed them across a variety of genres. From 2D fighters, a team-based brawler, a stealth-platformer, and even a free-to-play mobile RPG, the turtles’ pugnaciousness has proven to be remarkably pliable.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate demonstrates the squad kicking ass in a Hades clone. Although the effort is a bit too derivative, intense action and roguelike power-ups selections are a good fit for the heroes in a half-shell.

Zagreus Would Be Green with Envy

The title combines succinct backstory with an optional tutorial, with motivation rooted in Splinter’s disappearance to an astral plane. Unsurprisingly, you’ll have to take your selected turtle through a portal, fighting a succession of increasingly formidable Foot Soldiers that mercifully telegraph every attack.

Unlike the lone protagonist found in Hades, Splintered Fate delivers a bit more variation. Not only does your preferred reptile carry his own signature weapon, but each ninja turtle has their own distinctive starting perks. Pleasingly, developer Super Evil Megacorp doesn’t live up to their name. So, meta-game progress is shared across Team Green, benevolently reducing the amount of grinding.

Enemy Prioritization Is Essential

Runs move across a linear sequence of enemy-spawning arenas periodically broken up by boss battles. Your moveset offers the requisite evasive dash and a pair of skills, all regulated by their own individual cool-down timers. While you can tap a button to perform a basic attack, holding it down provides a sequence of strikes. Given that most enemies are prone to stun states, defeating clusters of opponents is fairly effortless.

Well, at least early on. At first, Foot Soldiers move slowly, sporadically dispensing melee and ranged attacks. But gradually, adversaries escalate in number, speed, assaulting with widespread blows that project translucent areas-of-effect on the ground. Persevere, and you’ll have to contend with a variety of opponents that deliver a non-stop barrage of blows, sending your choose ninja turtle ping-ponging across the battlefield.

Across each run, the difficulty ramps up gradually, providing pleasantly protracted play sessions. But given the multi-generational appeal of the Ninja Turtles and the game’s couch co-op component, it would have been appreciated if players could adjust the level of challenge.

Ninja Turtles Deserve Notable Perks

As with most action roguelikes, you’ll get to choose from different perks after each showdown as well as use earned currency to purchase advantageous items from pop-up shops.  Correspondingly, any rewards gained across each run can be spent back at your sewer-based headquarters on permanent Dragon and Dreamer upgrades.

Undoubtedly, these inject a bit of longevity and incentive, but the perks are formulaic, offering standardized boosts to speed and damage output. Sure, there’s some deliberation over bonuses that last a few rooms or ones that remain active for your entire run. But largely, Splintered Fate downplays noteworthy complexities like elemental damage and Ninja Turtle builds that can break the game. Another downside is the lack of variety. Across each run, you’ll battle the same bosses in the same order, making runs feel a bit too Sisyphean.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.