Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate Review (eypyeash)
Initial impressions a few hours in on release day. I'll probably come back in a month after I get more time (and so do the devs).
Pretty fun. Not quite as compelling as Hades, but definitely decent, with some bugs out and about.
Gameplay is fairly basic. You have a dash, attack, tool, and super button, and tool/super get charged through attacks. The tool can be swapped or upgraded during a run, and like most of these arena roguelites, each room gives you some kind of upgrade... maybe just some currency, often a power. The core of why Hades was so nuts was because each weapon was very different, and the stacks got funny and developed a custom playstyle very quickly. Three levels deep in the Turtles game and it's mostly just little buffs... yeah, maybe throwing three shurikens on dash and they return for a damage debuff, but it's not the bonkers stuff Hades offers.
And that's kinda fine. It feels more like a Turtles beat-em up, maneuvering and attacking and a bit of kiting.
Enemies are decently challenging... interestingly, mousers might be the most dangerous thing, because they can spawn in and start throwing whole webs of lasers down, which means you absolutely need to stagger them or get outta there to kill other enemies first. Shuriken foot projectiles do some light trajectory adjustment, and many enemies do the stupid armored phase thing where they just tank damage without stunning so you have to learn to dash through their attack patterns again and again. Fine for a dude or two, but this becomes more just "every enemy" a couple levels in.
Some enemy attacks can be pretty ambiguous. The enemy shurikens versus your own is just a size difference. When you start getting friendly Mousers, you need to pay attention to their green health versus the red health bad ones. Enemies can be hidden by scenery, with no way to tell except your attacks that try to auto-focus on something nearby.
At 4k resolution, I started having screen glitches. It wasn't tearing, rather the characters that were talking would swap with the other character in the conversation for a few frames and switch back. I've got a dual monitor 4k setup, but run them in 2k resolution, so sorta suspect the fact it automatically went to 4k but seems to be a borderless fullscreen means the two resolutions was freaking the game out. By swapping down to 2k resolution in the settings this went away.
I wouldn't recommend it wholeheartedly at the moment. Probably around 15 bucks I would say go for it unless you're just a huge turtles fan who likes a roguelike.