From the outside, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate looks a lot like Hades. The room-based gameplay, upgrade and power-up systems, approach to storytelling, and hack-and-slash combat will not be unfamiliar to those who have played the award-winning god-like roguelike. But that’s not bad. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all, and Splintered Fate throws it like a shuriken in this running-based romp of underworld sewage.
However, comparisons to critical darling Supergiant are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, Splintered Fate is Hades and anyone who liked to avoid the wrath of the God of the Underworld will find much to be entertained here; on the other hand, this is not Hades, and the inevitable comparisons it draws to combat, performance, and visual effects, may be its biggest knock.
Splintered Fate arrived fresh-faced and bushy-tailed (or the turtle equivalent) on Apple Arcade in May 2023. Launching on the mobile gaming service with very little fanfare, Super Evil Megacorp’s roguelike didn’t cause the kind of sensation we’re used to seeing from characters in a half-shell and its exclusivity on the platform kept it that way for the next 12 months.
Now on Switch, it looks like the game has finally found its home. It’s the same performance-based roguelike you’ll find on mobile, but with some added perks like reworked visuals, new controls, and a much-requested four-player couch co-op mode that make the Switch port feel a little more attractive. All of these new features are welcome additions, but they all rely on the strength of the base game. Fortunately, Splintered Fate is actually pretty good.
Master Splinter has been kidnapped (shock, horror!) and it’s up to Leo, Raph, Donnie and Mikey to get him back. To do this, the brothers must fight their way through the sewers and reach the rooftops, clearing rooms of fiendish foot soldiers and malevolent MICE while grabbing ability-altering power-ups along the way. If defeated, you are transported back to the underground lair where you can cash in your collectibles to level up before heading out to try again.
As both a TMNT story and a roguelike, there’s nothing too original here, but it works just the same. Each turtle has a unique set of skills, and you’re encouraged to try each one if you want to unlock certain higher-level upgrades. These bonuses can make or break a run with a decent variety of effects that benefit those willing to change their fighting techniques. And most importantly, it’s a much more approachable take on roguelikes than many of its contemporaries, with a selectable ‘Easy Mode’ available in the pause menu to be turned on or off at any point during the run.
Both online and local co-op options help Splintered Fate stand out enough from the roguelike crowd that it isn’t entirely copying and pasting the best parts of the genre. Roguelikes can often be a tough nut to crack, with a dense upgrade system and a daunting difficulty curve, and while Splintered Fate absolutely lives up to its upgrades and level of challenge, the option to let a friend help you out is welcome, especially in more late stage, enemy filled encounters.
And boy do these dates get packed. The visual style gets the job done (it’s a bit mobile, but let’s not forget its origins here), but sometimes it becomes difficult to keep an eye on your Turtle. Often waves of mutants and ninjas will flood the screen and burst with unique attack animations; a few quick hits help split the crowd, but at certain points the number of enemies serves as a quick reminder that co-op is the way to go.
In solo, things are difficult. You are low level initially and the game wants you to know it. You’ll die a lot, but the lively voice acting (including Yuri Lowenthal as Michelangelo) and the original story from TMNT legend Tom Waltz kept us coming back for more – even if some of the dialogue encounters went on a bit longer than we’d have liked. Again, the difficulty modifiers are there to make things a little easier/harder, but the core game already offers a healthy level of challenge.
After our first successful run, the additional challenges helped spice up the gameplay, so even with a decent number of character upgrades under our belts, things continued to feel relatively fresh. The dialogue and story systems aren’t as reactive as those in Hades, and we found ourselves spinning lines long before the characters had a chance to say them, but random mini-boss encounters, changing attack patterns, and variable density of enemies mean these things can still feel unique even if you choose a similar build every time.
We still had fun during our repeat playthroughs and were happy to see things gradually open up, but once we got the hang of everything, some of Splintered Fates’ flaws started to surface. Combat is smooth enough, but the Turtles’ arsenal of Attack, Specials, and Tools means most encounters become button-heavy in a way that the best hack-and-slashers avoid. Enemy attacks are predicted by a visible “damage zone” when they power up, so defeating them becomes a case of getting out of the way and spamming “Y” until a better option appears.
This isn’t helped by the game’s shaky performance on the Switch. Splintered Fate is relatively stable during busy screens, but the frame rate regularly drops when multiple enemies appear on screen or in sequences with large, detailed backgrounds. We also experienced a few severe crashes while performing simple tasks like visiting the in-game store. Fortunately, the autosave feature meant we could restart and go back to our work without issue, but that hardly helped with room-to-room flow. There’s a ‘Cinematic Mode’ setting that limits the frame rate to 30fps to ‘increase image quality’, although we found the visual improvements to be minor and actually preferred the higher but choppy frame rate.
These issues don’t overshadow what is a perfectly enjoyable and accessible roguelike, but they do reveal how this formula has been better in the past. The debt to Hades is too strong to ignore, and while the presentation errors and repetitive dialogue scenarios are frustrating in isolation, they’re made even more so by the constant reminder that this radical roguelike isn’t the award-winning odyssey it purports to be.
Conclusion
With a gameplay loop that effortlessly integrates the half-shell characters into the world of roguelikes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate is a fun and accessible Hades-like game best played with friends. However, despite the strength of the IP and the co-op addition, it’s not powerful enough to avoid unfavorable comparisons to the Supergiant classics, and it constantly feels like it’s on the back foot because of it. You may have fun here, but those who have spent some time in the Underworld will find it hard to shake the feeling that this central line is done much better elsewhere.
