Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge Review

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge is kind of like a remaster, a remake, and a whole new game all at the same time. It takes stages, ideas, and other parts from the old TMNT arcade games and combines them with some new ideas. The publisher, Dotemu, is best known for Streets of Rage 4, and the developer, Tribute Games, has people who worked on the Scott Pilgrim remaster. TMNT's arcade brawling is more like Scott Pilgrim, with crowd control being the main focus because it's easy to get surrounded by a lot of enemies.

But I wasn't too into Scott Pilgrim, even though I loved the movie version, but I'm really into Shredder's Revenge. It's a simple, fun game that's all about making us feel like we're back in the arcade, but without the punishing difficulty that was meant to keep the coins coming in.

Of course, you can play as any of the four brothers, and each has slightly different stats. Leonardo is the most versatile. Donny's staff gives him reach, but he doesn't do much damage with it. Raff has the most strength but the shortest range, and Mikey is the fastest. In addition to the heroes in half-shells, you can also play as Master Splinter and April 'O Neil. If you beat the game, you can play as Casey Jones. He wears a hockey mask and uses a hockey stick. That makes a total of 7 characters you can play as, which is a lot. Each of these seven can also level up, which gives them more health and even lets them learn new special moves.

The main way to fight is with a four-hit combo attack. Since you're only going to be pressing one button for most of the game, hitting the Foot Clan, dinosaurs, and bosses in the face should feel good, and I'm happy to say that it does. As you get closer to enemies, you can grab them and throw them in different ways, including throwing them at the screen, which is a great nod to the old arcade games. Attacks can also be done by jumping and dash-attacking.

It's hard to say if you'll want to play the whole game 7 times to level up all the characters. You can go back and finish missed challenges or collectibles to get extra XP, but once that's done, you'll just have to grind through the levels. I think a system where you get more XP for each maxed-level character could have helped get people to go back and level up all of their characters to the max.

But I do have a few complaints about the sound effects. It seems like the sound experts took the 90s inspirations a little too seriously. A lot of the work with sound is weak. When you beat a boss, there are no big explosions, your attacks don't hurt, and the dialogue gets lost in everything else if you don't change the settings yourself. It's not terrible, but the sound design just doesn't match the rest of the production. Strangely, there isn't a surround sound mix. The game seems to only have stereo sound. It's odd to find a stereo-only track in a side-scrolling brawler in 2022, but it's not a big deal because the soundscape is usually pretty small.

Conclusion

Overall. I think Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge is less precise and a little less skilled than Dotemu's own Streets of Rage 4. But I don't think that's a bad point, either. This is a much more casual and fun brawler than SoR4. It's a great game to play when you just want to chill out. This would be fun for everyone, from seasoned brawlers to your kids, which is great.