I feel it’s been quite a while since we got a good Turtles game. The last I played is Mutants in Manhattan, by Platinum Games in 2016. That game sucked balls, unfortunately. This, however, is hell-bent on bringing back the classic style of TMNT games in the NES and SNES era, either from the arcades or home consoles. And it looked great in the 2 trailers I saw. And it’s Tribute Games who made good shit before. And DotEmu who has been responsible for publishing very good shit as well. So it certainly had my interest.

Let’s see if it’s good!
Developer: Tribute Games
Publisher: DotEmu
Release date: June 16, 2022
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4, Xbone (Switch version reviewed)
Genre: Beat ’em Up

Review

One of the big strengths of this game is the presentation. It aims very clearly to replicate the style of a classic arcade beat ’em up, from the animation style to the story to the gameplay. And obviously making it with TMNT, some of the kings of classic beat ’em ups, is definitely on purpose. The story? It’s a somewhat standard TMNT episode from the old days back when I watched TMNT. Shredder and gang decide to steal the Statue of Liberty, and the Turtles go to stop them. You spend most of the game running after different villains as they’re trying to reconstruct Krang’s robot and such. It’s the kind of stuff you’d expect from this kind of TMNT game. The music sounds like something SNES-era Capcom or Konami would’ve made and has some bangers, a lot that do utilize the motifs of the TMNT theme song which was a pretty regular thing for old TMNT games. GaMetal worked on this, and you’ll definitely notice his style in some of the tracks (very underrated youtuber, subscribe now). And of course the pixelated but still modern style of the sprites and the really expressive and dynamic styles and animations of the characters look amazing. Also it’s very bright and colorful, which is great.. They take very inspiration on the classic cartoon, while not just replicating it wholesale, and I have nothing bad to say about how this game looks. They nailed the presentation in every aspect.

On the gameplay side, I do find it a bit tough to review beat ’em ups because they’re a fairly set genre, and one has to fuck up pretty massively to just straight up be bad. Kind of to the point where it’s a bit tough to identify what makes the particularly great ones, well, great. Like, yeah Turtles in Time is better than something like, let’s say, Growl (a pretty cool classic beat ’em up by Taito… kinda forgot it came out on Genesis, I remember the arcade version). But it’s hard to exactly quantify why Turtles in Time is so much better despite both games being tremendously similar. I’m gonna try, we’ll see how I’ll do.

All of that said, Shredder’s Revenge does have very good gameplay. The core of it is pretty simple. Each character has a very similar kind of moveset. You have one main attack button, which manages to allow for a lot of attacks; Normal combo, stronger single hit, uppercut if you jump at the same time, jump kick if you jump one then attack, a special aerial attack if you double jump then attack, dash attacks, there’s a slide attack if you run and press the jump button (this is a problem, of course, if you want to jump while you’re running…), and there’s a dash attack of sorts when you attack during a dash. Fighting enemies is really fun because they go flying on certain attacks and you can juggle the shit out of them. Adding the varied moveset, it’s really fun to fight things.

There’s a few other offensive options. Getting very close to an enemy and touching them goes into a grab. Some enemies are strong enough to break out of the grab, some not. If a grab is not broken out of, you can then throw the enemies. There’s a back throw left or right, there’s a down throw that smashes enemies on the ground, and there’s the fling which throws enemies at the screen. And finally there’s the super. You need a super bar, and each bar lets you do one super. There’s a few supers to choose from, one from the air that tends to be a strong single hit, one from the ground that tends to be multi-hit, and one you do during the dodge animation which… honestly I basically never used that one. In fact I rarely use the ground one either. Because the air one is really that good. Mix up all the options for fun combos (or find good moments during enemy hitstun and such to get grabs and try to throw into other enemies for some extra knockback and damage) and try not to die.

You have some defensive options. Namely, you have a dodge button. It ONLY dodges left and right, but it has lots of invincibility and, as mentioned earlier, you can attack out of it. Otherwise… you can attack enemies before their attacks hit you, or try to position yourself so something like a normal attack or a jump kick hits them but not you. You do get a dodge roll if you press the dodge button as you’re getting hit (you still get damaged but you’re back on your feet faster), and if you get knocked down you can tech off the ground to get back up quicker. That’s kinda it as far as defensive options. Rather than many dedicated defensive maneuvers, instead the game is about positioning and not fucking up your own attack timing. It’s very much a game of skill. Enemies don’t just let you hit them, as they can block, have different behaviors or timings meant to mess with you, and of course some come in with different weapons and such.

I find the playable characters are all pretty similar, but they’re not identical. There’s some “stat” differences like how hard they hit and how fast they move (as well as “range” which is more of an attack animation thing than a “stat”), their basic moveset might control the same but some of the attacks are a bit different (or very different in some cases). Or there may be different effects to some attacks. Like, most jump kicks just go through enemies, but Mikey’s bounces off enemies and he can air combo a bit more.  I think the variety is overall quite nice.

One mechanic that is a bit on the broken side, especially in story mode, is the taunt mechanic. Taunting and completing your taunt animation gives you one super bar. Once you’ve leveled up enough and gotten 3 super meters in story mode, you can easily take time in-between battles to taunt 3 times to fill up your super for 3 super attacks in the battle which will make most battles a breeze, and it’s generally easy enough to find openings to taunt more for even more free supers, and supers are extremely strong. In arcade mode it’s slightly less broken, but still very powerful.

So I guess I can talk about the modes. Story mode allows you to save between levels. Lives are given at the start of each level, so you’re basically always gonna have enough lives to survive the whole level even if you’re sucking a lot. There’s an experience system so you unlock attacks and super meters as you progress. There’s also items and characters to find in each level for some sidequest-y things. You can go back to previous levels if you want experience, or just power up different characters or do sidequests or something. Each level also has various challenges in story mode, such as using a bunch of different types of attacks or beating the level without getting hit and such. Arcade mode functions more as you’d expect an arcade beat ’em up to function. Namely, there’s limited lives (you only replenish lives when you get enough points), so a game over is a game over. There’s no leveling system, but you start with all the specials, but also you get only one super meter. So the strategy from Story mode where you stack super meters between battles is less effective. It’s still good, but in actual battles you need to be real careful about when you’ll try to taunt to get more super meter (supers ARE really strong so it’s definitely worth doing). Basically, Arcade mode is the “proper” way to play the game and is better designed from a gameplay standpoint, while Story mode is fun and has more to it, but is not challenging.

I do have a semi-big complaint. This game is… too long. It features 16 levels that are ~5-7 minutes long each, so no matter what you’re looking at well over an hour and a half for a full run. That’s a bit much. This is fine for the story mode which is meant to be a longer experience where you replay levels to find items and such AND you can save, but for arcade mode, that’s asking a lot. Imagine if this were an arcade cabinet and you’d have to stand in front of it for almost 2 hours to finish it… yeah, too much time investment. The big reason I hate that it’s so long is that I prefer playing in arcade mode, but you have to finish arcade mode in one sitting because if you reset the game or turn it off completely or exit arcade mode, you have to replay from the start when you come back. This would not bother me if the game were closer in length to, say, Turtles in Time… but it’s much longer.

Overall

This game is super fun. While the story mode is very easy, especially in Okay difficulty(which is Normal), it’s not the only mode. The arcade mode, especially in Gnarly difficulty, gives a very classic difficulty level, evidenced by the fact that I’ve never been good at classic arcade beat ’em ups, and this one wrecks my ass in gnarly difficulty (though at this point I’m very good at Okay difficulty).

This game definitely captures exactly the feeling it aimed for, is fun as fuck, looks great and sounds great. It’s nearly perfect. I have a few complaints, but regardless it is one of the best examples of modern beat ’em ups outside of Streets of Rage 4.

This game is a definite recommendation. Get it.