Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge Review: A Cowabunga Beat ‘Em Up

The game isn’t just a nostalgia-driven throwback, as it also marks the evolution of a genre.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge
Photo: Dotemu

Tribute Games’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is a shot in the arm for the beat ‘em up. A sequel to two of the classics that defined the 1990s arcade and NES era, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Turtles in Time, the game isn’t just a nostalgia-driven throwback, as it also marks the evolution of the genre.

Right out of the gate, it’s clear that the developers were aware that simply duplicating the 16-bit graphics and sound effects of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Turtles in Time, as well as channeling their core gameplay and old-school difficulty, wouldn’t be enough to sustain a contemporary video game across a lengthy campaign. Shredder’s Revenge goes the extra mile by bolstering its gameplay with modernized mechanics—including charge attacks, screen-clearing special moves, and, most crucially, a dodge maneuver (shades of From Software’s Souls titles)—that will allow the most skillful of players to avoid taking damage entirely.

Those mechanics give you a wide range of options across a range of different beat ‘em up scenarios, from going mano-a-mano with a difficult boss or trying to escape a horde of enemies attacking you from all sides. There’s a sense of inclusivity to the game’s overall design ethos, wherein those new to the beat ‘em up can have just as enjoyable a time button-mashing their way through levels as veterans will executing more complicated combos. (There are three difficulties to choose from, with the easiest being Chill and the most difficult being Gnarly.)

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Colorful full-motion video sequences (re)introduce us to the franchise’s characters, drawing from the same bright and lively cartoon imagery of the series that birthed the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles back in 1987, while the game itself is rendered in the same pixel art style as the video games that Shredder’s Revenge is building on. The core characters from the franchise are all represented, with the individual turtles all playable and distinct in their abilities in a more balanced fashion than they are in the prior games (no longer is Donatello, with his powerful far-reaching Bo weapon, going to be everyone’s go-to character) alongside previously unplayable ones like April O’Neil, who packs a wallop fighting in her Channel 6 gear.

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Shredder’s Revenge is a love letter to the franchise, but it isn’t above making fun of its innate silliness. In that sense, it follows the lead of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s original comic book, especially in the way that it mocks the criminal—and ineffective—ninja gang known as the Foot. Among the gags in the game are the various disguises that the members of Shredder’s posse don, from office workers to TV chefs, to shield their identities. It’s a level of funny that, along with the various references to past properties in the franchise that dot the sizeable and varied levels, sustains our interest across the campaign.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is about oversized, crime-fighting mutant reptiles, and Shredder’s Revenge is alive to the ridiculousness of that premise. The narrative retreads much of the plot of prior entries in the franchise, with antagonists Bebop and Rocksteady taking over the Channel 6 news station and kidnapping April’s hapless co-worker, Vernon, before then taking our turtle protagonists on a wild goose chase across New York and beyond. In one of the game’s best gags, your boss fight against Bebop culminates with a hogtied Vernon being unintentionally left behind in an office, leaving one to wonder if he’ll ever be found.

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The game climaxes in an over-the-top, multi-stage battle with dimwit alien overlord Krang and Shredder, both powered up in ways that cleverly riff on Turtles in Time and the second live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film. It’s an imaginative spectacle that, like the rest of the game, embraces both the history of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and its overriding kookiness. That’s enough to recommend Shredder’s Revenge to fans of the franchise, but the best part of the game is how it stands to advance the beat ‘em up, with the stellar addition of a dodge move giving players dynamic new ways of taking on cartoon villainy.

This game was reviewed using a code provided by Tinsley PR.

Score: 
 Developer: Tribute Games  Publisher: Dotemu  Platform: Xbox One  Release Date: June 16, 2022  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Drug Reference, Fantasy Violence  Buy: Game

Ryan Aston

Ryan Aston has been writing for Slant since 2011. He lives in Perth, Western Australia.

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