Our favorite heroes in a half shell are back in the latest DLC content update to Shredder's Revenge. Is the Dimension Shellshock expansion Totally radical? Or a bowl of turtle soup?
Shredder's Revenge was both the I Dream of Indie Games community and staff choice for game of the year in 2022, and with good reason! It's classic 90's-pixel art, awesome brawling mechanics, and co-op capabilities have made it perhaps my favorite Beat Em' Up of all time. So, as you can imagine, I was really excited to hear about the Dimension Shellshock add-on, which not only includes an addicting and challenging survival mode, but two new characters to play as. First, we get one of my favorites, and an action figure that I absolutley owned back in the day, Usagi Yojimbo! Some of you may only know Usagi from his connection to the ninja turtles franchise, but he's been around since 1984 and had a few successful comic book series of his own! Based somewhat on Miyamoto Musashi, the rabbits name is actually Miyamoto Usagi, though the Ninja Turtles franchise would incorrectly name his as Usagi Yojimbo all the way up until the 2003 series of turtles where they began to name him correctly. History lesson aside, I always loved this character, and while he doesn't dish out much damage, his quick attacks and great downward sword slash make him a welcome addition to the cast.
The other new addition to the cast is the female ninja, Karai! While maybe not the most popular or well-known character by mainstream Turtles fans, she does date back to 1992 having appeared in tv, comics, and even other videogames! At one point she was a leader of the foot clan, and a love interest of sorts for Leonardo! Many versions of the turtles also have her as shredder's adopted daughter, so its an interesting history with this character. For those of you who played teenage mutant ninja turtles tournament fighters back in the day, which by the way was a pretty fun game, you might recall seeing her there, or maybe even playing as her. Sorry, spoilers for an old ass game.
Anyways, both characters are really fun to use, and can be utilized in story, arcade, and survival modes which is awesome!
Survival is the biggest new feature in this DLC, and while on paper maybe a survival mode doesn't sound all that thrilling, but its surprisingly well executed and pretty addicting in Dimension Shellshock. Your goal is to of course take down waves of enemies and survive as long as possible while collecting enough crystals to travel to new dimensions. These areas include dimension mirage, Edo, and omni channel 6 just to name a few. Once your life bar is completely depleted, it's back to the beginning.
You'll be able to collect a few crystals through each stage, but surviving to the end of an area is crucial as you'll be presented with 2 portals to choose between. One of these portals might present you with pizza to help restore some of your lost life, start you out with an unlimited special power up, give you a limited stat boost or you may gamble on taking some additional crystals in hopes of surviving and advancing further along. This risk reward element makes the mode pretty endearing and adds some strategy.
The longer you survive, the more the greater the challenge, but thankfully the more you use a character the more they level up. Leveling up will give you new perks like additional lives, health, or even unlock new color palates for your characters. If trying to survive long enough to reach Shredder isn't enough incentive, players are also able to compete on leaderboards to see how they stack up against the rest of the world. Another thing I really liked is that every now and then you'll be presented with a portal with one of your enemies faces on it, and should you hop down that portal you'll get to play as the villain for a while until you take a certain amount of damage. While not as fleshed out as the main cast, it was definitely a blast to control Bebop, Rocksteady, and even Shredder himself for a little while.
All told, the survival mode is a great new addition to Shredder's Revenge, and I can't wait to try and get even further into it. The other new addition with the DLC would be some new musical pieces from Tee Lopes! They are of course just as good as all of the other tunes in Shredder's Revenge and fit in perfectly with the turtles' universe.
As for complaints, my only real issue was in some of the level design, mainly cliffs. Things can get a bit chaotic, especially with more than one player on screen, and this made any level with a pit or bridge to fall off of a bit annoying at times. Given the small size of these arenas, that could be frustrating for some players, though certainly not a deal breaker.
Dimension Shellshock isn't necessarily a massive DLC expansion, but it does add quite a few more hours of fun to Shredder's Revenge, and a great reason to pick up and play even more of one of the best brawlers of all time. The new characters are fun, and the survival mode is overall well thought out and executed. Here's to even more turtle power in the future!
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