Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate Review

Does the mere thought of a Hades-style Roguelike starring everyone’s favourite heroes in a half-shell have you rubbing your hands with glee and jumping up and down on the spot? Then you may as well stop reading this review now and play Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate because you will have an absolute blast.

Don’t forget to order a pizza and invite your buddies around too, because like every TMNT game ever made it’s even better with friends.

In a clever move, Super Evil Megacorp has chosen to base Splintered Fate on the IDW comics series instead of the TV show. It makes sense since, it helps the game stand out from the other adaptations and it also lets them use all that delightful IDW artwork for the characters, a boon for a game that apes Hades down to how it presents characters during cut scenes and conversations as static images.

Splintered Fate opens with Leonardo getting jumped by the foot clan while training on a rooftop. Then when he returns home he finds out that Splinter has been kidnapped by Shredder. Thus it’s up to you, and up to three friends, to go and save Splinter from the clutches of their nemesis.

Each Turtle essentially acts as your choice of weapon and each of the four represents a different style of fighting and tool that leans towards different builds. Leonardo finishes combos with special attacks and tosses ninja stars at enemies, Raphael favors short swift strikes and doing critical damage and has a chain for pulling enemies towards him, Donatello uses wide sweeping strikes to hit multiple enemies at once and has a shield, and Michelangelo hammers foes with his nunchucks while taunting enemies to draw them in and cause more damage.

Just like Hades clearing a room will net you new elemental powers and pick-ups that range from new tools like the ability to reign meteorites down on enemies, lightning that zaps enemies or adds toxic ooze to your dash attacks, and many more. Like Hades, half the fun is navigating the mountain of temporary buffs and upgrades to try and create the deadliest character possible, while the other is grabbing enough currency to unlock that next permanent upgrade that will hopefully make that next run a little easier.

In Splintered Fate you collect dragon coins, and, after you’ve defeated Shredder’s adopted daughter, Karai, dream coins. Dragon coins unlock upgrades that boost the basics like attack power, critical chance, and health. Dream coins are used to upgrade the chances of getting better buffs during a run like abilities unlocking at higher levels, or increasing the amount of loot certain enemies drop.

You can also unlock artifacts during each run that you can equip to help you lean into a certain element, or build. They’re well worth experimenting with, especially if there are certain elemental attacks and tactics you prefer to use.

Each of the game’s four main areas features a mini-boss battle that then unlocks them as a regular champion or veteran enemy and is capped with increasingly tricky boss battles against four big bads from the Turtles that include Leatherhead, Karai, Bebop and Rocksteady, and Shredder.

Once you’ve beaten a boss the first time, there is also a chance that you’ll fight a harder variant of them the next time. Leatherface gains huge area attacks, Kirai covers the floor with lava, and Bebop and Rocksteady throw even more mousers at you after they scarper mid-fight to take a quick break.

Splintered Fate also features online coop for when your friends can’t come around for a session. It’s a simple system that works flawlessly, set up a room, tell your mates the room code and they drop straight in. Even if someone’s running late or needs to drop out early it’s a snap to drop in or out at any time you like.

You’re going to need every bit of help you can find to slog through the late game too because after you beat Shredder for the first time the difficulty skyrockets with the addition of modified challenge rooms and remixed boss battles that add irritating mobs of tough enemies and hit like a truck, and are the only way you’ll be able to scrape together enough coins to afford the hyperinflation that effects upgrades after the first couple of levels.

The presentation is serviceable, you can see what everything is easily enough, and even with the top-down view it’s easy to figure out what’s what, even if the environments are a little dull as you go from the sewers to the docks, to the street, and finally the rooftops. The character art is lovely during conversation scenes but I wish there were more of them as characters seem to pop in, say hi, and then vanish. Never to be heard from again.

Likewise, there’s a fairly limited number of enemy types with you spending most of the game fighting foot soldiers, mousers, and punk frogs of various colors and sizes… and that’s your lot.

Final Thoughts

Overall TMNT: Splintered Fate is an enjoyable roguelike that wears its influences unabashedly, even blatantly at times.

But if you make a modern Roguelike, it makes sense to crib from one of the best.

What is most impressive though is that Splintered Fate manages to save itself from being derivative thanks to some superb coop play and clever use of the TMNT license to create something, that though not wholly original in its mechanics, is still an absolute joy for fans of both roguelikes and the Turtles alike.