Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge absolutely rules

polygon.com:

It’s worth reiterating this headline immediately: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge absolutelyrules.

Shredder’s Revenge is, through and through, a modern game — but it feels exactly how I remember the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles brawlers of my youth feeling. My siblings, cousins, and I crouched our tiny bodies around an even smaller TV, taking turns in duos to rough up the Foot Clan. But memory is fickle. More than how those games actually played, I remember the sensations of playing them: frantically button-mashing my way through environments that moved way too quickly, while gradually building out a repertoire of moves to fall back on.

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I still get a lot of joy out of playing those games as an adult. But the veneer has rusted over the years — now, they feel impossibly slow and a little repetitive. With Shredder’s Revenge, developer Tribute Games has achieved exactly what a lot of nostalgia-based remakes have failed to achieve before: It plays just like my memory tells me those brawlers played in my childhood. And it’s delightful.

Published by Dotemu, Shredder’s Revenge pulls from both the games and the TV series to put the turtles — Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael, and Leonardo — and pals April O’Neil, Splinter, and Casey Jones up against Shredder, Krang, and the Foot Clan. The bad guys, also joined by Bebop, Rocksteady, and plenty more troublemakers,