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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge (PS4)

Status: Finished playing
I started playing this game on Thursday 7 December, 2023  //  I stopped playing this game on: Thursday 7 March, 2024
Current opinion of this game
No comment, yet.

March 7, 2024 12:57:13 PM
This was great fun to play couch co-op.

I've been at it in fists and starts since sometime in November? (or maybe it was December). Basically, whenever "the kids" were all around - we'd play a bit of this. In the end it was just two of us who finished it.

What I found interesting is how little the "modern" additions (more moves and combos, an upgrade progression system for each character, collectibles and challenges for each level) to the brawler style seemed to matter. At least to us. Sure, it was nice to level up and get stronger - but it wasn't something we were chasing, it just happened as we played. I never paid too much attention to the combos - and I'm guessing if we were playing on the harder difficulty levels this might have been different...we just sort of played through on basic, definitely lost lives, but were still able to pull through. The collectibles were fun, and we did go back an replay a few levels to pick them up. But, they didn't seem to add too much to our experience of the game...

What DID feel good - and I recognized as being a "modern" addition - where all the fun animations and little tidbits in levels. Quite a few were gags and such - and it made the experience such that I enjoyed paying attention to what was going on in the different scenes and such. So, instead of the game having three times as many enemies/enemy types - it just added new/bespoke to the level animations (e.g. regular enemy comes out of a store eating an ice cream) that were fun to watch. It made the game feel like it had more depth. This isn't a knock on the older/original games at all, it's just an "art budget" sort of thing. What do you do when you want to do something that really closely resembles an old game (in style and gameplay) but can do it with current tech? Go for the subtle improvements - like better animations (more frames? more resolution, but still pixel-based looking).

 
kudos for original design to Rodrigo Barria