Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles : Splintered Fate – PS5 Review

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate is the latest game featuring Eastman and Laird’s 1984 pizza loving reptiles. Owned by Nickelodeon since 2009, this was originally released on Apple Arcade in 2023, then Switch the following year with it being deemed successful enough to release on PS5 as well. We tried to work out the chronology of two other TMNT games we spotted on the shelves of our local game store, they being TMNT: Mutants Unleashed and TMNT Wrath of the Mutants.

The first one was set in the same universe as the 2023 film Mutant Mayhem, the one with the Seth Rogen story collab and Nine Inch Nails doing the music. The second being a rebooted version of the classic arcade game but with the 2012 series branding.

Finally, Splintered Fate apparently derives from yet another iteration of the Turtles franchise, in this case the IDW comic books as licenced from Nickelodeon. Colour us bewildered. If we’re confused, what hope has the average player got unless they’re a massive Turtles fan already?

Splintered Fate might as well be subtitled Splintered IP given how many gaming offshoots there are.

If you ask us, we’re too old for this now. Heck, this reviewer was already in their teens when the Turtles first showed up in animated form, though due to the BBC deeming ninjas too risque, they were called Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and any appearances of nunchucks were edited out to appease censors, most likely within the corporation.

Anyway, the developer Super Evil Megacorp, who we’ve never heard of, have deigned to make a roguelike of Splintered Fate. It’s a brawler in typical fashion, in a forced isometric perspective.

This might’ve seemed a spiffing idea on Apple Arcade, but in a market already flooded with far better takes on roguelikes without the IP baggage that comes with the TMNT licence, it all feels a bit unnecessary on PS5.

For a start, there’s reams of exposition via earnestly delivered voice actors and penned by one of the comic book series writers. For anyone really into their Turtles lore, this is probably right up your street. For us, it was just something to skip. Not to mention try to make sense of.

In essence, Master Splinter has been captured by Shredder and its down to you to rescue him. You’ll encounter vigilante hockey masked dude Casey Jones as well as April O’Neil, familiar to even those on the periphery of this fandom. But for every well-known character, you’ll face many you’ve never heard of.

The enemies themselves are largely familiar with you having to dispatch Shredder’s goons, the Foot Clan and those annoying little robots called Mousers to start with. Each run begins in the sewers with sub-stages being punctuated by fights with groups of enemies. Beat them and you’ll unlock abilities. Move on to the next stage, rinse and repeat. Then go to the in-game store where you’ll meet the mysterious Chairman. Then face off against the first boss, Leatherhead.

Then you’ll either defeat him or succumb to your injuries and get bumped back to your lair. More exposition will follow as you’re introduced to the multiple upgrade paths that underpin your progress. You’ll gain currency of at least three sorts during your playthroughs that allow you to unlock incremental upgrades as well as access the in-run shop.

But upon starting a run again, you’ll have to play through the sewers yet again, only this time with your new abilities. And face off against Leatherhead again. Heck, if we wanted to see this much of Leatherhead, we’d move to the town in Surrey of the same name.

You’ll beat him again and again. And probably lose before you reach the next boss if you’re playing in single player. Any progress you make feels incredibly granular and that’s with our having chosen the easy difficulty mode for the purposes of this review.

It was about six or seven tries in that we realised we weren’t really having much fun playing Splintered Fate solo. Thankfully having a second Dualsense meant we could play local multiplayer with our other half. She gamely played with us, we even made a little more progress than usual, but after an hour or so, declared that the repetition on display wasn’t exactly inspiring.

It helped a little that having another player along for the ride meant you could double-team the enemies you faced, particularly the bosses and minibosses you encounter.  But even with another player on board, matters remain resolutely uninspiring.

We simply didn’t care enough to play that far into the game, let alone repeating the same section countless times to make a tiny bit of extra progress next run. What really broke our resolve to see Splintered Fate through wasn’t the frankly dull gameplay. It was the awful health system.

The best way to prevail is to not get hit. At all. As the only way you can replenish your health is to increase your overall health or to buy pizzas at the shop. The former replenishes a little bit of health and the latter is the only reliable way to get your health up to a level that you’ll stand any chance of getting deeper into the game. And even then you’re reliant on picking up scrap metal, the only currency the shopkeeper accepts.

Just let us kill enemies and give us occasional pizzas to keep our health topped up. Why make it so damned onerous that you’re reliant on such a flawed method to heal up, It’s not good.

In the absence of a level select to expedite matters, there’s no way to get any further without another run. We’d not even mind if trophies were disabled if we used a level select, but when the only way is to play yet another run, we simply don’t want to. The enjoyment, what little there was of it, has long since diminished along with any enthusiasm we had to continue further.

We’d not mind if we didn’t have to retread so often, but we’re not so invested in the storyline that we feel compelled to play anymore. So we won’t. And we’d recommend that anyone but the most die-hard Turtles fan doesn’t either.

TMNT: Splintered Fate is a game that goes in a different direction with a co-op angle, but when the gameplay is as insipid as on display here and the repetition is so overwhelming, it’s hard to garner any will to play. The flawed health system together with the need to replay sections over and over again, remixed with slightly different enemy encounters had us switching off and doing something else instead.

The litmus test for this writer is if a game can’t divert your attention enough so that it is preferable to doing some actual work for the company we work for, then it’s fundamentally failed. We’ll stick to spreadsheet analysis instead of this. Super Evil Megacorp seem aptly named as they’ve actually increased our workplace productivity. Perhaps they’re HR professionals in disguise.

In conclusion, TMNT: Splintered Fate is a tepid roguelike with flawed implementation that we played for too long. Don’t waste your time and play a better example of the genre instead.