TMNT: Shredder's Revenge review

I'm not in the habit of reviewing mobile games that are locked to a subscription service, and the only reason I'm doing one for TMNT: Shredder's Revenge is because I didn't realize it was a Netflix exclusive game until I had already almost finished it. As a flashy brawler capitalizing on a nostalgic franchise, this game does a pretty good job of generating those warm, fuzzy feelings for everyone's favorite pizza-devouring humanoid turtles, even though the enterprise can be annoying.

It is very clear from the outset of TMNT: Shredder's Revenge that this game leans very hard into nostalgia, both for the aged Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle property and also more specifically the 1991 arcade beat 'em up Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time. It is a play that generally pays off if you have the respective affinities from way back when, but I also presume that the colorful and distinct visual design that has long-aided the TMNT brand over the years has still got the legs to attract relative newcomers as well.

The game itself is a pretty safe iteration on the Turtles in Time formula. Pick a fighter, fight through minions with varying degrees of annoyance, face a boss, and repeat. There are some welcome refinements here, like a broader cast with unique abilities, some light rpg elements, etc. but by and large this is a game that hinges on your tolerance for beat 'em up bullshit, and the degree to which the game's theming and/or playing with friends mitigates the more frustrating aspects of this genre.

Because TMNT: Shredder's Revenge was never designed to be a quarter-sucking arcade game, I will say that the amount of beat 'em up bullshit in this game is toned way down compared to the games it's paying homage to. Both the tools you have at your disposal and the enemies you use them against are designed to encourage and enable mastery to the point that you can make it through stages not just on one life, but entirely unscathed.

All of that said, just because a bad situation has improved does not mean the situation is now good. There were probably still a half dozen or so supremely annoying things that made appearances in my playthrough that I would qualify as bullshit, and the fact that so much of the game has otherwise been sanded down to eliminate these kinds of problems, it makes them stand out more. Platforming sections, flying enemies, vehicles, etc. all end up rearing their head and--though they may look cool on a hypothetical attract mode screen--playing through them is generally miserable.

For all the annoying crap endemic to beat 'em ups as a genre, I completed TMNT: Shredder's Revenge just fine playing by myself. It probably would have been more fun with other people, but there just wasn't a practical way for me to do that. There's matchmaking, which is cool, but the way that I play games wouldn't facilitate being able to do this in a reasonable way. In any case, I was prepared for the amount of friction I came across in levels simply by nature of knowing that's kinda how these games work.

What I was not prepared for, though, was just how clunky, unintuitive, and strange TMNT: Shredder's Revenge's entire onboarding and menu system is. There's a tutorial screen that appears whenever you want to play, a weirdly high amount of button presses for character selection, level navigation that barely works with touch controls; the list goes on and on. Every time I booted this game I felt like I was fighting to get in to play it. The good news is, once you're actually in a level, there's nothing that creeps its way in there to derail the experience. Well, nothing besides the normal bullshit that comes with these games.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was my favorite show growing up and I played the hell out of Turtles in Time (as well as a lot of other, much worse TMNT games). With that in mind, it may take some of the shock out of hearing me say that I actually had a rather good time with Shredder's Revenge. Seeing Krang and being able to kick his ass makes me say "hell yea this is pretty good" just as much now as it did 30 years ago, but that doesn't change the fact that TMNT: Shredder's Revenge has the same bumps in its gameplay that just about every beat 'em up has, and then some.