- Game: Snoozy Kazoo's Turnip Boy Robs a Bank
- Release Month: January
- Started: 08/12
- Completed: 09/12
I played the first chapter in the sinister saga of Turnip Boy's misadventures across a post-apocalyptic Earth ruled by sapient food earlier this March (though it was released back in 2021) and when I noticed its sequel was on Game Pass this month, I figured I'd add it to this GOTY itinerary as well while the vegetable villainy was still fresh in the memory. That first game was a solid Zeldersatz elevated by its bizarre premise and Zoomer-coded sense of humor that occasionally revealed a darker side to itself beyond simply pissing off the IRS, but I recall specifically that in the post-game it opened up a secondary mode that recycled its twin-stick shooter mechanics into a tough run-based dungeon-crawler set on a moving train. Evidently the developers liked that mode enough (or it saw enough positive feedback from players) that they've more or less gone that direction wholesale for this sequel.
Turnip Boy Robs a Bank is set shortly after the events of the first game (and after an inter-game "great war" that NPCs talk about with no small amount of PTSD, though one we're never privy to seeing firsthand) and has the titular root veggie flipping the massive Botanical Bank by driving through its wall with a van and purloining all its valuables as a means of rediscovering his newly learned family legacy of organized crime as the son of the late Don Turnipchino. TB's task is to snatch as much money from safes and vaults as possible and, before the alarm system counts down to zero and has law enforcement enemies pour in to stop you, return to the van at the entry lobby and skedaddle—essentially, you're the rutabagman on this job. (Rest assured, I labored as hard for that pun as the makers of this game did for their copious other puns about produce.)
As a modern "roguelite" (we really need to do something about that term) there's a permanent progression aspect to alleviate the disappointment of failed attempts: between levels you can spend your freshly approbated lucre (you keep half if you die) on upgrades like more health, more damage for melee or ranged weapons (I usually went with the latter), more time before the cops show up, and other important boons like a Canadian milk bag that apologizes when it gets spilled. There's also the Dark Web: a fondly regarded marketplace for underworld types which you'll often visit when tasked with procuring an item necessary for further progress. This might include a lantern for a dark zone, C4 to open the vault doors, a pickaxe for dismantling statues, and other broken bridge contrivances that occasionally halts your critical progress in its tracks until you've earned enough from ransacking runs for the money needed to make the problem go away. The weapon system is interesting too: you can take two firearms with you, but if you carry weapons dropped by enemies back to base your cronies can research them which eventually adds more weapons to the starting arsenal. This creates a dynamic that incentivizes picking up random enemy weapons and trying them out, keeping them on hand regardless of whether they're an improvement on your defaults or not. Once I'd unlocked the laser pistol, though, it was rare to find anything in the wild that could match its damage output and accuracy, barring a few post-boss weapons.
The nature of the game is that the bank areas on the ground floor are static but there are elevators that randomly spawn instances on each run. So what I mean by that is that the game has a set number of areas these elevators will take you to, but the same elevator won't always take you to the same spot. There's a few random offices and vaults—they're not procgen, but they're similar to each other—but also specific instance rooms like the hellish "The Other Side" that offers a wave-based combat mini-game (fortunately, it pauses the cop timer while active) or the homes of various quest-giving NPCs. There's a whole bunch of these sidequests, incidentally, and they can be a pain because the sponsors (and the quest targets) will often be in these elevator zones and so won't always be available on any given run, so you're often having to put off handing in a sidequest until the elevator RNG plays nice. Most of the rewards for these tasks tend to be cosmetics (or items needed for a different sidequest) so they're not strictly essential, but they do at least often serve as distractions to break up the usual loop of simply running around and grabbing whatever isn't nailed down before the fuzz arrive.
It might be my general distaste for run-based games talking, or my heavy-lidded apathy for Payday and its feisty, heist-y ilk, but Turnip Boy Robs a Bank felt like a step backwards after Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion; though at the same time, I'll give credit to the developers for wanting to take that gameplay format in a new(ish) direction for the sequel to avoid repetition. The twin-stick shooter gameplay is still mostly fine—there's some real annoying hitbox ranges for the melee-based enemies that makes a ranged option even more preferable, and I really didn't care for the game's "final boss"—while the comedy writing still finds an adequate middle ground between trenchant wit and TikTok brain rot, plus it definitely doesn't outstay its welcome at a svelte 3-4 hours, so I'm not going to say that this is a bad game or a waste of time by any stretch. More that its format just wasn't my thing, and I'll cop to some resentment that a promising Zeldersatz series got demoted to yet another run-based action game with an incremental progression system. Still, this pattern can only mean they're planning something else entirely for Turnip Boy's third outing and I'll no doubt be curious (and eager) enough to give it a look when it arrives. Maybe "Turnip Boy Shoots a CEO"? Too soon? (Rating: 3 out of 5.)
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