A couple years ago I wouldn’t have believed that one of the most nineties things ever would go through a video game renaissance in the twenties, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate has made me a believer.
Sure, fans have had plenty of nostalgia-steeped offerings to enjoy over the last few years. Shredder’s Revenge brought back the classic spirit of the turtles’ side-scrolling heyday and last summer, the classics themselves returned to the Cowabunga Collection. Now, Super Evil Megacorp is bringing something truly new and modern to consoles and proves this radical franchise can still feel relevant.
In this original take on the TMNT mythos, Shredder abducts Master Splinter. Once again, Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo must sally forth to beat the Foot Clan and save him.
TMNT: Splintered Fate is a roguelike where players pick their favourite turtle and challenge a gauntlet of semi-randomized levels. The goal is to grab power-ups and upgrade currencies from defeated enemies and get as far as you can before you’re ultimately defeated and sent back to the hub—in this case, the turtles’ sewer home. Power-ups are temporary, but permanent upgrades can be purchased to increase attributes like max health, damage, critical rate, and so on. Then it’s back into the fold again to try and make it further next time.
“The true challenge of Splintered Fate doesn’t begin until you beat its final boss and unlock the Shimmering Portals.”
Each of the brothers has their own playstyle based on their weapons and personalities. Leonardo has mobility with his twin katanas, a dashing special attack, and starts with a shuriken tool; Raphael has a short range but several buffs to his critical hits and starts with a grappling rope tool; Donatello restores health at the start of each fight and charges tools faster, which comes in handy for his defensive tool; and Michelangelo’s nunchaku give him the biggest range and a higher chance to multi-hit, complemented by his unique taunt.
Choosing a turtle is just the first of many choices in Splintered Fate. After clearing each room, players are offered different random rewards, like one of the various currencies (like the temporary scrap and the Dragon or Dreamer Coins that persist after defeat), swapping abilities, or unlocking new abilities. There is a vast list of upgrades falling into different themes like elemental attacks and ninja skills.
This is the kind of engine in which savvy players could spend uncountable hours experimenting and optimizing. Of course, the randomization makes it tricky to pursue that optimal build that suits your favourite playstyle. Luckily, Splintered Fate lets players influence its roguelike power distribution somewhat with rerolls or artifacts, which increase the chance of getting a bonus pick when choosing an upgrade from your favourite element.
After a few failed runs, I had the means to put together a pretty solid fire-based build on each attempt—using the dash action to set nearby foes ablaze, then letting the Inferno buff whittle their life bars down so I could close back in and finish the job from a safe angle. Naturally, on some attempts, that strategy didn’t come together, so I was forced to make do with what I had… which in turn led to other breakthroughs.
“Splintered Fate might just be my favourite interpretation of the TMNT since childhood.”
Younger players might bounce off of the core conceit of replaying the same gauntlet of levels over and over again for smaller long-term gains. Yet, after replaying Splintered Fate‘s first two bosses a handful of times, it occurred to me that Ultra Games’ (fundamentally broken) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had prepared me for this moment.
Back then, I was pushing to get just one stage farther and had nothing to show when I inevitably drowned in the seaweed during the bomb-defusing mission. In a roguelike, you’re still pushing to get a little further each time, but you’re gaining the currency to make permanent upgrades in the process, so you can come back stronger next time. Not unlike a young anthropomorphic ninja training for hours with his weapon, replaying the early levels is an opportunity to hone your build and skills while gradually buffing your stats under the hood.
The true challenge of Splintered Fate doesn’t begin until you beat its final boss and unlock the Shimmering Portals. These random modifiers appear at the end of rooms and add some brutal stipulations to the rest of a run, like increasing the range of enemies’ attacks, buffing certain factions, or upping prices at the mid-run shop. Bosses and minibosses get similar “Gauntlet” challenges which compound the difficulty yet again—Leatherhead certainly put me in my place as payback for making a mockery of him a dozen times.
Add a few of these portal challenges, and Splintered Fate changes dramatically. However, you can also earn the serious materials that unlock the best permanent upgrades. Portals pop up at the end of most stages until you opt out of one, and then they won’t be offered for the rest of that run, so you can take on a couple of mods and ease into the heightened difficulty. These modifiers are wisely offered as a risk/reward proposition.
The glue that holds the whole concept together is its voice cast and its original story, penned by Tom Waltz (who worked on the 2011 IDW series alongside co-creator Kevin Eastman) and Kevin Michael Johnson. Splintered Fate might just be my favourite interpretation of the TMNT since my childhood, from the art style to their voice cast to the amount of dialogue.
There’s the requisite one-liners during gameplay and corny jokes in cutscenes, like individualized exchanges between each turtle and boss—but what really impressed me was the quantity and variety of incidental scenes found in more circumstances than I would’ve expected. For example, my first encounter with Karai ended in defeat, and when I fought my way back, she had unique lines to mock me.
Some of this falls into repetition at points, naturally, but it’s clear that Super Mega Evilcorp had the best intentions of keeping the game interesting. It can be all too easy for this franchise to fall too far into the cheese, and Splintered Fate maintains the right equilibrium. (Having Yuri Lowenthal as Mikey and Roger Craig Smith as Raph goes an awfully long way too.)
Now that Splintered Fate is hopping onto consoles from Apple Arcade, starting with this Nintendo Switch release, it gets to benefit from local co-op (as any TMNT game should). Up to four players can play locally on one Switch or in online multiplayer with shareable “run codes” to invite others. While I didn’t get to take this feature to its full potential before release, this game has all the makings of a couch co-op mainstay.
The giant mutated elephant in the room, of course, is Hades 2, the sequel to the game which inspired a roguelike renaissance of its own. Splintered Fate may lose a lot of its oxygen to Devolver’s upcoming juggernaut as its early access period goes on—but in the meantime, this is the perfect title to hold people over while they wait for Hades 2‘s full version or just want to revisit a universe from their childhood.
With its carefully crafted take on the franchise, plenty of customization and growth, and nigh-endless potential for multiplayer replayability, I think I’ll be hanging out in the sewers with TMNT: Splintered Fate for a long time.
