Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition Review

Super Evil Megacorp, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sure have had a lot of video games. The history of the comic book-turned media franchise phenomenon has run almost concurrently to the lineage of the interactive medium itself. From the NES all the way to the Nintendo Switch 2, from arcade beat-em’-ups to fighting games and countless crossovers, Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman’s vigilante reptiles have become as synonymous with video games as they are with film, television, and comic books.

It’s only natural then that the franchise would eventually make its way to one of gaming’s most ubiquitous genres in recent years – the roguelike. Developer Super Evil Megacorp recognized the potential for the beat-em’-up icons in the action roguelike subgenre back in 2023 with the release of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate, a game that manages to capture most of the inherent potential of this concept in spite of a few shortcomings.

Narrative

For an action roguelike of its structure, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate’s storytelling is surprisingly light. The game follows a simple premise of the gang attempting to save Splinter from the clutches of Shredder’s Foot Clan with the likes of April O’Neil, Metalhead, and others such as Angel assisting them on their journey.

On their various runs through and beyond the sewers, they encounter iconic enemies such as Bebop and Rocksteady, Karai, Leatherhead, and, of course, Shredder, while growing stronger on repeated journeys.

Between runs at the Lair, there’s very little in the way of character interactions or unique dialogue opportunities. The closest Splintered Fate offers to these are conversations that each of the four Turtles can have with Splinter’s projected image, which usually involve them asking their father for guidance after a defeat. While these moments are admittedly a bit touching, as they show a vulnerable side of the characters that is not often seen in these more traditional incarnations of them (as opposed to the Rise of the TMNT or Mutant Mayhem versions). It does leave the narrative overall feeling quite bare, especially when compared to its obvious influences.

Gameplay

Let’s get the obvious out of the way here immediately – Splintered Fate is heavily inspired by Supergiant Games’ Hades. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it’s a framing that helps contextualize many of the design decisions that carve out the backbone of its structure. Players control one of each of the Turtles (or, in the Platinum Edition, their comrades such as Casey Jones, Metalhead, and Slash) through a series of randomized rooms where the objective is to wipe out all enemies, after which they are presented with a list of optional upgrades to improve their combat prowess or character stats, or currency for permanent progression.

Combat is cleverly adapted from the brawlers that have defined the characters’ video game personas. Instead of equipping one character with unique weapons, each Turtle acts as a weapon loadout themselves with unique skillsets. Leonardo is the all-rounder with decent range and strong mobility, Raphael has low reach but packs a heavy punch, Donatello’s staff can reach far but is slow-moving, and Michaelangelo’s nunchucks cover his surroundings but leave him wide open during combos.

Even without dabbling into the DLC characters, there’s a good variety of playstyles to choose from with just the base roster, and combat has a generally good feel to it, although fights can grow visually noisy at times, making it hard to read character animations. Controls and collision can also cause some friction, with characters sometimes getting locked in certain directions and a lack of lock-on making it hard to aim at specific enemies during large fights.

Players guide the characters through four major biomes, with the third area offering a choice of a DLC area known as The Junkyard with its own unique boss. This is notably shorter than contemporary action roguelikes and, it seems, for good reason. On the whole, Splintered Fate is a far easier game than others in its field and, it seems as though Super Evil Megacorp has designed it to act as a gateway entry to the genre. This makes sense as it’s likely that this will be a lot of players’, primarily children’s, first experience with the systems and design principles that roguelike sickos have come to love. It does leave the experience feeling a little thin, though.

I beat my first run-through of the game, up to the final boss, on my fifth or sixth run, including the tutorial rounds. As per usual, the real game begins after you’ve had your first triumph over the final boss, with the further quest to the true ending taking little over 10 hours, which feels relatively brisk for the genre.

It’s worth noting that a potentially large part of the appeal for Splintered Fate will be within its cooperative gameplay, which admittedly does help set it apart and makes a great fit for a TMNT game. I unfortunately didn’t get to try this in local play and could only participate during online matchmaking. In my experience, the game is decently balanced for up to four players, but online connectivity is pretty poor, with some heavy input latency hurting the experience. This experience is even more forgiving than the main game, though, as permanent progression crosses over even when playing with another player as the host, and each player is revived from death at the end of each room regardless of how many revives they have available.

After each run, players return to the Turtles’ Lair to upgrade their abilities or swap out characters. Permanent progression is unlocked via currencies known as Dragon Coins and Dreamer Coins that can be acquired during regular runs or via challenges in Metalhead’s Lab, which makes challenges in the main game even more of a breeze.

It’s hard to fault Splintered Fate for what it tries to offer to the genre while being so derivative. I know for a fact that before I got into roguelikes, I would have appreciated a game like this to help me familiarize myself with the genre’s fundamentals and understand what I was getting myself into, but coming to it after the fact, it feels a little too gentle to offer a truly meaningful experience. There’s little in the way of memorability here, especially in the wide pantheon, but it’s hard not to at least recommend those with a passing interest that are put off by the intensity of action roguelikes to give it a try.

Visuals & Audio

Visually, Splintered Fate feels caught between the 2003 animated series and the IDW Comics incarnations of the characters. The game uses comic book character portraits while in-game visuals use a seemingly smaller budget form of 3D animation that can look rather stilted and inexpressive up close. The main issue that stems from this is that things can get very visually noisy during combat, owing to the simplistic character designs and a somewhat messy UI. There were more than a few occasions where I spotted myself taking damage far later than I should have due to how crowded things got around my character, and having the health bar float above the player character’s head during combat instead of in the corner of the screen makes for messier maneuvering than necessary.

The music is a pulpy spin on the familiar sounds of the 80s cartoon that other throwback video game adaptations have played into lately, namely Shredder’s Revenge. There are cheesy guitar solos and synth pop aplenty, none of it particularly memorable nor unwelcome.

A major issue with the sound design stems from the nauseating overuse of canned character dialogue during exploration and combat. The Turtles verbally react to absolutely everything, and the extent to which this dialogue is repeated on each run is egregious. Worst of all, reducing the voice volume in the settings only affects the dialogue during cutscenes, meaning that the only option to reduce the frustration that comes from this is to mute the game or device, which is unfortunately how I spent a lot of my time with the game.

Nintendo Switch 2 Performance

The Nintendo Switch 2 build of the game seems to be a massive improvement over the blurry, long loading screen plagued Nintendo Switch version. This version offers graphics that scale well to the 1080p handheld screen and on a 4K TV while docked, although neither seems to be pushing the upper limits of their maximum resolution outputs or hardware. I only noticed a few momentary frame drops while playing in handheld mode, and none while docked, and loading screens don’t outstay their welcome, although they are frequent, seemingly due to the game’s inherent structure. Either way, this is a solid way to experience Splintered Fate on the go, and the game is perfectly suited to that playstyle with its short run-based structure.

Verdict

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate offers a brisk, low-stakes action roguelike experience with solid combat that gets a lot out of the IP and serves as a great entry to the genre. For veterans, however, it might be a little harder to engage with, given how thin a lot of its mechanics truly are, and tedious quality of life and technical issues will feel more intrusive.