Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate Review

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate is an action brawler rogue-like game developed and published by Super Evil Megacorp. The game was released for the Nintendo Switch and has recently been ported to PC as well. The game can be played with online or couch co-op. Compared to Shredder’s Revenge, the game holds it on quite well, but there are some technical problems that can really drag down the experience.

I’ve heard many compare Splintered Fate to Hades, but I haven’t played that game, so I can’t comment on that. For me, the closest games I’ve played to it are the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games. The game is displayed with a pseudo-overhead view. You get to pick from all four of the turtles and each one is quite different. Leo has the most all-around range with his katanas, Don has the most range overall with his bo, Raph is faster than the other aforementioned two yet has less range, Mikey has the least amount of range and damage but all of his attacks hit multiple time. All of them are greatly varied. I especially liked Michaelangelo’s gameplay.

You have an attack, a dash, and two special attacks mapped to all four face buttons. The dash has a cooldown to where you can’t constantly spam it. The two special attacks charge as you hit enemies. Each turtle has their own unique combos for their attack and their own set of special moves. All turtles also have their own unique dash attack that you can perform during a dash. The overall combat is shallow but still fun. It’s overall very button-mashy. Compared to Shredders, it’s way more limited.

The game is set up like a survival mode. You only have one life as you go through all stages. The turtles start in the sewers and eventually work their way up to other areas. Each stage is split into sections where you’ll go through a certain number of enemy waves. Enemies range from your usual foot soldiers to mousers and other bigger types of enemies. There is a lot of variety in the game’s enemy types. If you happen to die, you go back to the turtles’ lair and have to start once again through all the stages, but you keep all your permanent upgrades, so you’ll go back through the stages a bit more powered-up than last time.

For the most part, you’ll be dashing in and out of attacks while damaging enemies. Each enemy gives off the radius of their attacks with a neon signal as they are about to attack, which gives players warning so that you can dash out of the way. This system is quite good. It really shines during boss battles. Boss battles go all out with a huge boss enemy that has multiple phases and several different attacks per phase.

The game starts out at the sewer headquarters of the turtles. From there you can pick your turtle and upgrade him accordingly. You’ll get money to upgrade your turtles during battles. There are two types of currency. One currency is for small items such as health pickups and other types of power-up that only last for a few rooms. The other currency is for permanent upgrades. The turtles seem to share all permanent upgrades (such as health, damage, number of dashes, etc).

Overall, the game is pretty good. It’s nothing super stellar, but it’s a very fun “pick up and play” type of game. The main thing that brings this game down are the bugs that you’ll randomly find. The bugs are annoying and keep you from progressing. There is one that can happen quite often in the turtle’s lair where the arrow icon for leaving the lair will not appear. At that time, you are simply stuck in the lair (soft-locked). In order to make it appear, I had to keep opening and closing upgrade areas to bring up menus throughout the lair hoping that the arrow would appear again. It literally carries over in your save file if you let it linger. Another glitch is not being able to back out of menus. You’re stuck in a menu. I kept working around with various options to get out of one menu. I’m not sure if every bug has a workaround, but I found one for each of the bugs that I had. Problems like this are inexcusable for the amount of time this game has been out and the fact that it has been ported to other systems.

I also have to give this game some major props on its voice acting. This voice acting is some of the best I’ve seen for a Ninja Turtles game. The actors have a lot passion for the source material. It mimics the old cartoon series in a way, but it’s still very much its own thing. The turtles sound great and so do other characters. Each character seem to have their own unique look separate from other source materials as well. For instance, the frogs look quite different from the old TV series, but it is very fitting. All dialogue takes place with still pics (full of expression) and word bubbles. It’s a pretty simple setup but the voice acting carries it to a new level.

So, there you have it. The game is quite a decent brawler rogue-like experience, but it is heavily brought down by its bugs. You might play the game and not get any in the short-term, but keep playing and your bound to run across one. The worst part about the bugs is how they soft-lock you out of progressing. Without the technical problems, I’d give the game somewhere in the 70% range easily since it’s quite good on its own, but the problems bring it down quite a bit overall.

The Good:
+ Fantastic voice acting
+ Overall fun survival experience
+ Really fun boss battles

The Bad:
- Many bugs. It seems that all can be avoided (if you know how to make them go away) but some do soft-lock the game