Splintered Fate

I've been having a blast playing "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate". I had been totally unaware of this game until my brother brought it up a month or so ago; we picked it up (I think during a Steam sale) and have been continuing our tradition of Co-Op Turtle Power.

 

 

This game doesn't seem to be at all connected with the earlier "Shredder's Revenge", which felt like a revival of the property. Shredder's Revenge was a very loving homage to the early-90s Turtles In Time side-scrolling beat-em-up arcade game, with an elevated take on the original gameplay and an aesthetic very closely tied to the 80s/90s cartoon. Splintered Fate is still the Turtles, of course, but feels closer to the later animated series in visual style and humor. As I've gotten deeper into the game I've come to realize that the gameplay is basically a ripoff of Hades - which is a good thing, as Hades is one of my favorite games of the last few years!

Unlike Hades, though, Splintered Fate is designed for multiplayer. You can play single-player, but narratively all four turtles are moving through the story at the same time, and mechanically it's more satisfying if you have multiple bodies on the field at the same time. I don't have a sense yet for whether the game scales up based on the number of players.

 

Like other rogue-lites, SF combines a per-run temporary build economy with a persistent game-wide economy. During a run you will pick up "Dragon Coins" and "Dreamer Coins", which are useless during a run but can be cashed in at your base later for permanent upgrades, much like Gems or Darkness in Hades. The actual upgrades are almost identical to the ones in Hades, although to be fair I think just about any game would have them: extra lives, quicker movement, more damage, higher rarity powers, and so on.

There are also "artifacts", which are like the Keepsakes of Hades: you pick one at the start of your run but can swap it out during the run. You can use them to force-draw certain upgrades (like a "Manhole Cover" that guarantees getting a Water power and boosts the chance of getting better Water powers), or for other upgrades that last during your run (like an increased Dodge chance). Unlike Keepsakes, you unlock Artifacts by defeating specific bosses for the first time or achieving certain other milestones.

As you play through the story, you also unlock some possible developments that will impact the game. The biggest one I've noticed so far is a "care package", which results in hacked Stockman Mousers who will fight on your side instead of against you. Once unlocked, you can use Coins to further upgrade the odds of it happening.

The actual run is, again, a lot like Hades. Instead of Tartarus, Asphodel, Elysium and Styx, you have the zones of Sewers, Docks, Streets and Rooftops (even mirroring the rising elevation). Environmental impacts come into play similarly: you didn't need to worry about lava until you reached Asphodel, and in Splintered Fate, you don't need to worry about rain or lightning until you reach the Docks. You start a zone by getting a Turtle Power, which is basically a Boon. Each chamber you clear gives you a choice of rewards, which could be Scrap (Obols), Pizza (Max Health), Dragon/Dreamer Coins (Gems/Darkness), limited time boosts (Well of Charon), or enhanced Tools (Daedalus Hammer). So that's a bit different from Hades, where you chose the next chamber based on the advertised reward: here there's a single exit from each room but each room has multiple reward choices.

Like Hades, there seems to be a fixed number of chambers in each zone, but the actual map selection and enemies are randomized each time. The first chamber is a freebie that gives you a particular type of upgrade (a Turtle Power / Boon for Sewers, an Inspiration for Docks, etc.). Most chambers are standard encounters with a mix of regular and elite enemies. You'll face a couple of minibosses, which are especially tough and have their own attack patterns and mechanics. There's a shop, with "The Chairman" sitting in for Charon; like Hades, you can spend Scrap along the way on in-run or persistent currency, but if you make it all the way to the last shop and have saved a lot, you can buy some big-ticket items. Each zone ends with the same boss, although they seem to randomly sometimes have a tougher variation.

 

One thing I really like about Splintered Fate is that your Special and Tool are charged up by attacking enemies, and not just on cooldowns. This makes "trash" mobs actually a kind of valuable resource: if you have a few weak unarmored Foot Soldiers or Mousers at the beginning or end of a fight, I'll just wail on them with my standard attack to fully charge my special abilities, then when facing tougher foes, I'll unload on them.

I've pretty exclusively been playing as Donatello for this campaign, other than a short outing as Leonardo when playing the tutorial. As my brother happily reminds me, playing Donatello feels like cheating: he gets free health regen between each level, and his Special also makes him immune to all damage for a short time, so he's way more survivable out of the box than any of the other turtles. What I like best about him, though, may be his Special, which is a spinning bo attack that does AOE inside a decently wide radius. There are a lot of fights where you'll be fighting around a dozen weak Foot Soldiers, who can take a while to take out individually but go down quick if you can cluster them together and spin to win.

I'm finding that my many many hours playing Hades has prepared me pretty well for this game; as my brother noted, Elden Ring probably helps as well. You learn to read enemies' attack patterns, attack when there's an opening, avoid being greedy, be ready to dodge and get out of the area when things look dangerous. In particular, I've taken the mantra of "dash dash dash" from Hades: enemies can't hit you while you're dashing. I've prioritized getting the Dash upgrades, which has helped a lot. During a run I usually try to pick abilities that add more utility to the Dash: there are some that do damage where you start the dash (similar to Ares' Blade Rift), some that do damage where you end the dash (similar to Aphrodite's Passion Dash), and one that throws a shuriken out in front of you (like Demeter's Mistral Dash).

Also somewhat like Hades, you kind of need to decide whether to focus on a particular aspect and pick Powers and Upgrades related to that, or go more broad and get a wider variety of weaker abilities. I've gone both ways, and think it's probably better to focus on one or two main damage sources, but of course it does come down to RNG and what you get offered. It does feel really nice when synergies start kicking in, though. One of my best runs so far had multiple things that could proc Light Shell, which briefly deflects all projectiles, and then multiple abilities that enhanced Light Shell by damaging the enemies.

As of this writing, we've played, hrm, maybe close to a dozen runs. The game feels very well balanced and tuned, with us consistently getting a bit further each time we play. We've made it to what I think is the last boss (and even has a similarly bogus refill-health-bar-once-near-death move), and who knows, we may be able to beat it next time!

 

The game isn't perfect, of course. While the chambers are varied and have great atmosphere (some remind me of Shadowrun Returns levels), there are a few maps where the isometric walls extend into the battlefield, making it impossible to see your turtle and the enemy when you're behind them. The controls are generally good but don't feel quite as fluid at Hades, especially the Dash execution. While we've gotten better, we had a lot of frustration in our first few runs when we would keep mashing buttons at the end of an encounter, accidentally picking the first reward offered without being able to read them. We've had a couple of odd glitches, including one time when the game soft-froze when my turtle died during a boss fight.

None of those have interfered with our enjoyment, though. It's been fun to scratch that action-rogue-lite itch again, and doing so with the Turtles is surprisingly satisfying.