At PAX East 2022 not only did Jesse and I get to hang out in person for the first time in literally years, we also got to play some dang ol’ videogames together for the first time ever! We passed the controller back and forth in Cult of the Lamb, but truly got the co-op ball rolling with Dotemu and Tribute’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. Spoiler: it was dope as Hell.
Because we both played and were both juiced up on TMNT hype afterward, I figured we should try something new for the coverage tubes. So we went back and forth in a “letter series,” or a back and forth conversation in text. We get to talk like normal humans, but wear our Journo Hats at the same time that way! Good for us, good for readers and good for Prima, hopefully. Here goes:
TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge Preview @ Pax East 2022
Lucas White, Prima Games:
Hey Jesse! I dunno about you, but The Game at PAX East 2022 I wanted to see was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. I’m not like a huge TMNT mark (they’re neat though, and I definitely was as a kid), but I couldn’t tell you the number of times I’ve smashed my way through Turtles in Time on the SNES. Knowing this was coming and sitting in “spiritual successor” territory was all I needed to get hyped.
Where was your head at before we got our appointment booked? What was TMNT and/or this game to you before you played it?
Jesse Vitelli, Also Prima Games:
Honestly I’ve barely played any TMNT games outside of an arcade cab at my local pizzeria. I sort of fell off the Turtles wagon a while back, but have always had a soft spot for them. Was curious to check out Shredder’s Revenge because I’ve been looking for a good reason to revisit the TMNT world. I was excited to see how the devs mesh old and new school stuff, especially since I hadn’t really been paying attention to a lot of the external media stuff. My closest point of reference was when the Turtles appeared as playable characters in Injustice 2 (which ruled).
Man, I totally missed Injustice 2 and forgot the Turtles were even in that. Videogames are wild. I was always paying attention to TMNT games when Konami was rolling ’em out, and yeah that means I was down with the ones on GameCube! Things got messy after that but at a basic level those arcade games have stuck around in my mind forever.
When we first sat down to play it was like picking up where things left off. The way the game sounded, the way the story was introduced, it all brought me back to the SNES game. The vibe was captured perfectly, and seeing it all in HD was, well, weird. I mean, here’s this if you need a refresher:
It’s like Tee Lopes ripped the damn sound fonts right out of that thing. And god I miss the old Konami jingle. But yeah, if April and Splinter weren’t on the character select screen you could’ve told me it was a Turtles in Time remake and I would’ve believed you. Since you have less active brainworms than I do, what was your initial reaction when we sat down on that miraculously comfy couch and Shredder’s Revenge booted up?
Related: The Cowabunga Collection Revisits Konami’s TMNT Library (Updated)
My initial reaction was excitement followed by, “damn this shreds” (pun intended). I’m a big fan of Streets of Rage 4 and how that game’s combat flows. Shredder’s Revenge isn’t as mechanically complex as SoR 4 but I actually appreciated that. It seems approachable and easy to learn. You can do some absolutely wild stuff like slide canceling attacks, really sick team-up moves and air juggles that really suit the gameplay style.
It’s like a Saturday morning cartoon come to life. Playing as Donatello and Master Splinter felt totally different. The button combinations accomplished the same end result, but all the animations were different. Each character felt like a totally different vibe and I mean that as a compliment.
I know you picked different characters when we played, how did you feel about your choices?
Yeah, I’m glad you went to gameplay because like you said, wild stuff. In Turtles in Time you had a lot of the same basics, but you couldn’t smash things together, do cancels, etc. So recognizing that foundation here, but faster and more complex, plus being able to juggle and cancel with or without another player was so good! It really is like SoR 4 dialed back a bit. Like they speak the same fighting gamey language but at different levels.
I picked April then Michelangelo, and those ended up being good choices. With April, I really got a sense of the game’s timing and rules, since her moves go back and forth between big, chunky swings and really fast, agile aerial nonsense. She straight up has Chun-Li’s Tenshokyaku move, which taught me the same buttons but pressed a little differently produces different moves!
Meanwhile, Mikey had a spammable dive kick thing going on that was a totally different dynamic compared to April. I also noticed throwing enemies had a lot going on under the hood, and I was only able to scratch the surface there. And the special moves! Having a meter instead of hurting yourself to do those felt great, especially since you could taunt to instantly build up a stock. There’s just so much more going on in Shredder’s Revenge’s combat than I ever would’ve expected.
I was barely able to remember what the actual levels looked like because I focused so much on what I was doing. But then the boss battles kicked in and that was a whole new vibe. How’d you feel about those?
They seemed cool; both fights we went up against were some big, tanky fights [Lucas: Bebop and Rocksteady, baby]. We had very clear windows to do damage even when eating some hits yourself. I hope somewhere in the game there’s a faster, more speed-driven boss fight. I love, in a beat ‘em up, when some bosses expect more than raw damage output to really get down the timing of the fight. Hope to see more of that down the line.
For sure. Turtles in Time had a few “gimmick” levels with things like riding on surfboards in the sewers or… riding on hoverboards in the future? I’m curious to see what sort of shenanigans will break up the regular gameplay here.
So, closing thoughts. We ran this demo through twice, although it was a pretty brief two level affair. For me, I’m really hoping to see things like a “training” mode to really fool around with the mechanics and maybe another playable character or two. It’d be weird not to have Casey Jones in the mix, you know? I’m also not super feeling the teammate revive thing; it felt way too slow to be useful in some situations. Otherwise I am so totally on board, yo.
Anything specific you want to see, or anything that maybe didn’t seem great in the demo you hope gets ironed out?
I think my takeaway is that this game is solid all the way around, at least based on the two levels we played. The music, combat, aesthetic and animations are all great. Ultimately my only question left is how Shredder’s Revenge holds up across the entire game, how long it is, replayability, that sort of stuff. Which we obviously won’t really know more about until we sink our teeth into the final release.
There’s so much to unpack with this game, especially everything spinning around in my brain. But we’ll save it for the next time we get our hands on Shredder’s Revenge. For now, I’ll get to work on dropping our conversation with Tee Lopes, who we hid in a corner of Dotemu’s booth with and hopefully recorded a legible interview. There’s no release date just yet, but we can expect to have the full TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge experience sometime this coming summer.
