For the 80s “kids”, here you certainly are going to be delighted, of course, an arcade model can look outdated for this year, but, one short and fast gameplay can be a positive factor to achieve our deepest memories. Anyway, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, which from now on I’ll quote as one abbreviation for obvious reasons, it’s a game released on July 16, 2022, and it’s possible to be played in multiplayer mode, produced by Tribute Games and published by Dotemu.

Tribute Games is an independent studio located in Montreal, Quebec, funded in 2011 by former Ubisoft employees, they are owners of several other games, such as Curses’N Chaos, a game that has a similar style to Teenage, and also Mercenary Kings, released on 2014 in a shoot’ em up mode.

Dotemu, responsible for the publishment, is a French enterprise, funded on 2007 byXavier Liard and Romain Tisserand, responsible for developing and publishing various games, among them we have the most famous ones, Street of Rage and Metal Slug Tactics.



About the style

Many of the players of this new generation of consoles and creations probably won’t be used to this game style, the beat’ em up, was very common and famous in the arcade era, this style still holds the glory that can be passed to the younger generation and remembered by the older one. That being said, this mode consists basically in hordes and hordes of monsters attacking you nonstop, and we’re not counting on the obstacles, as you try to survive in a simple progression, but how come? It’s possible to walk only to the right side to advance, so, if you forget to collect some items, it is impossible to catch them again, unless you repeat that phase because there isn’t the possibility to regress on the screen.

During the gameplay, we are going to pass several different levels as we progress, totaling 16 challenges and some surprises, facing classic villains of the animated series, divided between Manhattan and Coney Island, where is possible to find two types of weapons, one simple where the progression is common and the combat isn’t variated, depending only on the player speed, and the other is a faster one, where the enemies will come in full speed on all sides, the enemies are marked with red points on the screen to be able to dodge and advance.

Unfortunately, these two modes are the only ones, in other words, after some time everything can be repetitive, fighting and hitting until the final boss and passing the phase.



Fighting the repetition

If you play on single player you’ll probably get tired of it, this is because the game is extremely short if you only want to complete the story, without aiming for all the conquers on the map, with almost 3 hours in the normal run, but, invite your friends and play with the max number of people, it’s possible to do a Coop of 6 players, here the producers placed a cool mechanism, all the turtles are available, Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael, and my favorite Leonardo, it’s also possible to play with some commons characters of the story, having 7 characters in the total, counting with Splinter, April O’Neil, and Casey Jones, but don’t worry, that’s not the mechanism yet.

First, I have to explain that the first part of the game doesn’t start with a frantic fight nor with cutscenes telling us the story, but with a tutorial with all possible hits, besides dogging methods and counter-attacks. This way, as we play with a specific character, this character will be upgrading its level and unlocking new powerful hits, this is because there is a command that stocks one hit that uses the entire energy bar, which is recharged as we hit our enemies without suffering any hit and its possible to have several of these according to the character level and most of the times this power is fatal.

So, finishing a campaign won’t be your main goal because everything is simple, but playing with friends in this or in arcade mode where the game has rules of one common arcade, can be fun especially if you try to use all the characters and upgrade them.



80’s commands and arts

Talking in a more technical term, in the speed that Teenage Mutant passes, is necessary to find easy controls that have a fast comprehension, in other words maybe it’s simpler to click on some buttons to be able to do an unexpected combo as it was in your childhood Mortal Kombat.

Don’t worry, the game producers try to simplify everything, besides there is a tutorial, in the beginning, there are a few different commands and most of them can be activated with a simple key, a dodging button, and another one to jump, and so on. Besides this, the game art can’t even be criticized, since it has the mission of bringing a nostalgic feeling to the players, and to remember the arcade magical times is only necessary for the producers to copy the technology of that time, of course, with improvements on transitions, cleaner graphics and other points that can be improved.And that’s what’s been delivered and claimed for an entire generation, some artistic details are the pixels classics, exactly like the old times.

Not only that, but it’s also valid to remember some sound effects, besides existing some cutscenes that I’ll talk about more later, together with a powerful technic of crashing some bottoms to be able to destroy everything and everyone, Shredder’s Revenge has a cheerful soundtrack that is connected with the combats, besides standard music, hits also have that standard sound of hits, powers, and dodges.



Powerful techniques

If someone watched at least 10 minutes of any animation of Ninja Turtles probably realized the love the characters have for pizza, but let’s be honest, who doesn’t? Anyway, the game makes direct references to this boundless passion, that is because the consumable items are all in pizza boxes, totaling three, each one with a function. In this context, one of them is responsible to heal the entire life of the character, another one makes the character spin around in an insane way and eliminate everyone around, and the last one has the function of giving infinite energy for a limited time, allowing us to strike special blows nonstop.

Not only that but other elements can be easily found on the map, smashing barrels, fragile walls, and others, most of the time they are related to secondary missions in the map and the game, for example, it’s possible to collect VHS tapes in some phases that are going to unlock new challenges during the progression.



The narrative isn’t on focus

I’d said before that your concern won’t be to complete the story, this is because besides being a short game, there isn’t a big focus on the narrative, and the cutscenes can be confusing, even more, if you lose your attention for 10 seconds, but, honestly, we can’t ask much of the producers in this aspect, after all the story of this group is very famous.

Let’s be honest, even in the animated series most people didn’t care for what was happening, we only wanted to see all the fighting and our favorites ninjas defeating enemies, so, that is exactly what the game will give us, fighting and several enemies in different levels, ninjas, rhinoceros and various types of robots.
 
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge is available for PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Linux, Xbox Cloud Gaming, Microsoft Windows.