izigame.me

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate might be one of the better TMNT games out there, but it does lack in a few areas and has A LOT to talk about.
First, the gameplay in run upgrades. It's very similar to Hades in that regard. You pick your turtle, each one having their own weapon with a special ability, and a tool. The tools and special abilities charge based on damage, and in a run you can swap out your tool if you see fit. There is an okay amount of build variety with upgrades. You have damage overtimes with flame, ooze (poison), ultrom (shock), and more. You have your simple upgrades of damage, attack speed, etc, and even health upgrades. While the turtles all have different moves, they also have different 'inspirations' which act as passive buffs in a run. Raph has higher crit chance and damage, Leo lets you have two charges of special, Mikey has higher multi-hit chance, and Donny restores HP when entering a room (which is nice in the early game), but you can still gain other turtles inspirations in the run which makes the turtles less unique. I find myself enjoying Raph and Mikey the most because of their movesets. Those are upgrades in a run, they're fine. The combat is kind of simple and the enemies never really change mid run besides getting stronger, which isn't that big of a deal. You have four biomes, all ending with a boss and having a miniboss, shop, and regular encounters. While that is fine, it doesn't seem to have much inspiration elsewhere and the runs become a bit monotonous towards the end as it's just a crazy amount of enemies, and some of them have WAY too much armor. Regular rooms are harder than mini bosses in the third and fourth (mostly fourth) biome because enemies can take a solid 30 seconds to kill because armor. The bosses aren't that bad, they're fun to play against, and a little tanky, but you can get a busted build to melt them, but armored enemies is just straight up terrible, even with the upgrade to do more damage to armor. So, combat as a whole is solid, but can feel a bit boring after a handful of runs.
Now where the game struggles and shines at the same time is meta progression. In your runs you gain dragon coins and dreamer coins. Dragon coins upgrade the turtles with every basic upgrade. Health, speed, damage, crit chance, health restored, being able to find health mid run (very important to get), attack speed, you name it. Bascially EVERYTHING is upgraded with Dragon coins, everything that will make runs easier, and that is just kind of bland to me. I don't mind meta progression in a game like this, but it just feels so uninspired, and with that normal runs, and especially difficulty enhanced runs won't feel too winnable until X amount of upgrades. A bit unfortunate but it is what it is, you still have more meta progression with dreamer coins. These allow you to upgrade artifacts you can find (buffs in a run, kinda like keepsakes in Hades), and upgrade more economic benefits. Starting a run with more scrap, higher chance for higher level upgrades, that type of stuff. I like the Dreamer coin upgrades more in terms of they feel more inspired, but Dragon coins are definitely more valuable.
Last I want to talk about difficulty. A big one to a lot of people. This game is VERY easy, or very hard. you unlock difficulty enhancers by clearing the game once (took me about 7 hours), and the enhancers aren't that bad. You can go through a portal in certain levels to add a difficulty enhancer for the run and gain more dragon/dreamer coins. These are okay, and some of the enhancers are well thought of. Certain enemies do more damage, less upgrade choices, shops cost more, etc. Those are fine and can definitely up the difficulty of a normal run, as a normal run is VERY easy up until chapter 4 (for me atleast now that I'm 12 hours in as of writing this). The only chapter 4 issue is armored enemies. Base runs are kinda easy once you get into the meat and bones, but one thing that REALLY gets hard is boss fights, they straight up feel unwinnable with these enhancers. Once cleared a run, every boss and miniboss can be turned into a gauntlet for added difficulty, and the minibosses, they aren't too hard. Adds a good challenge most of the time without feeling totally unfair with enemies all spamming lasers and shurikens at you, but the bosses... holy god man/ I've only cleared the first boss with a gauntlet mode and it was just straight up terrible. I lost both of my revives, the boss was SUPER tanky, and spawned CONSTANT enemies throwing down AOE's and spamming poison rats at me. It felt like it was hard just to be hard and not to have any fun. There is no in between from a super easy boss fight to unfairly hard which is disappointing for me.
At the end of the day I do think this is a good game and I'd recommend it. It's a very nice TMNT game, and a nice change of pace from the typical beat em ups. I do think their is a decent amount of balance issues with armored enemies, gauntlets for bosses, and meta progression feeling so uninspired, but at it's core, the gameplay is well done and I've enjoyed my time with it. I fully want to beat it and hopefully will have the time to. Even if I stopped playing today at 12-13 hours in, I'll say my purchase was worth the money

EDIT*
Forgot to mention this game does have multiplayer outside of local co-op. I only played it for about 30 minutes, but it ran well with two random people. I noticed the difference in attacks instantly because of delay, but once you adapt to it the game runs VERY well for co-op. Good to play with friends if that's your style! (and you all get your own upgrades, meta progression, etc)