Turnip Boy Robs A Bank is the follow-up to the 2021 original, which saw the eponymous Turnip evading his tax bill. It’s been two days since you killed the God Mayor Onion and a Mobster Pickle breaks you out of jail. A Garlic named Stinky owns a bank and in this weird future of foodpeople, you’ll slash, shoot, trip, and quest your way through four to six hours of roguelike mayhem. Turnip Boy Robs A Bank is hilarious, looks good, sounds incredible, and plays damned well. Some late-game difficulty spikes soured it a bit for me, though solid accessibility options mean that for the first time in human history, everyone will want to take a bite out of this Turnip and oh yeah, it’s releasing into Game Pass on Day One.
Beet the System
The game begins with a slick cutscene, featuring Turnip Boy getting broken out of the slammer by Dillitini. His father’s former enemy has come to his rescue to take revenge on Stinky the Garlic, an asshole banker that he hates. The comedy hit hard for me, the game is less meme-focused than the first one. It focuses more on just being weird in its own way, with a ton of callbacks to the original. It’s best if you’ve played that one, or at least watched a playthrough, though I think you can still enjoy it well enough coming in cold.
Turnip Boy Robs A Bank is a roguelike in which you’ll spend a short period of time (2:30 at the start) fighting your way through a bank trying to steal as much money as you can. Starting with a weak melee and ranged combo you’ll quickly power ramp your way up to more health, damage, and various abilities. This is a four-button game where A interacts, X swaps between your two equipped weapons, the left trigger is dodge (aka falling on your face), and the right trigger shoots.
Taking it to the Ham
So much of Turnip Boy is its feel. The game’s presentation is slick, there is a lot of text to read for the main and side quests and it’s routinely hilarious. While your protagonist can only respond in !!!, ???, and … everyone still seems to know what he means. It’s a “so stupid it’s brilliant” type of script and it knows that the premise can only go on for so long. Much like the first game TBRAB is a shorter experience, with credits rolling for me after roughly 5 hours or so.
I did go around and try to do as much side content as I could. These generally offer you a stupid hat to wear, like a rabid dog or a mailbox. This is a game I’ve enjoyed going back into and reloading my pre-final fight save to clean up everything I’ve missed. Its run-based nature is fast, and frenetic, but manageable. I am not a fan of timers in video games, but the one in this game simply means you need to hurry a little and not instant failure if it runs out. Every time the clock hits zero the fuzz shows up, they’re easy enough to dispatch at first but they will overwhelm you over time.
Turnip Boy has several hearts that lose health at 25% intervals depending on the attack that hits him. The default difficulty can be pretty tough and you’ll need to master the fall of your face dodge to stay alive. The game offers up a bevy of accessibility features including an easy mode, God mode (aka nick mode), auto aim, and laser aiming assists so that any and everyone can beat it. The best part of the game though is its mix of sprite graphics and music.
Turn It Up
Graphically the game is well animated though it runs at a 4:3 aspect ratio with bars on the sides of the screen. It didn’t hurt the gameplay at all though it was a bit jarring with the game’s default/ugly-looking side bars. You can change them in the option and once I did I forgot it wasn’t running in widescreen. Also, I had no HDR on Xbox though that tends to show up later with review titles lately, and AutoHDR was enabled on the PC version where it looked vibrant af.
By far my favorite part of the game was the music. It set the mood perfectly for the fast-paced murder-thon that was each run. As I was blowing up vaults with c4, knocking down statues with pickaxes, and cutting into safes with a laser pointer I was bopping along to the fully controllable soundtrack. The main menu goes hard and it never stops from there. There is no voice acting, instead it’s a mix of synth murmurs whenever someone talks to Turnip Boy. The music elevates the entire experience, as it put me into a zone where the repetition of the tasks never becomes boring over time.
I had zero bugs or issues with the game on console or PC. No crashes, glitches, or really anything, though as always your mileage may vary. Outside of some late-game difficulty spikes my main issue is the lack of replayability. Once you’ve cleared the map out there didn’t seem to be much else to do and I would have loved a new game plus mode of some sort. Still at its $15 price the six or so hours that will take is reasonable.
Wrapping Things Up
Turnip Boy Robs A Bank is a damned good time, that is just as long as it needs to be. Whether you’ve played the first game or not it is well worth checking out on Game Pass. Good looks, fun gameplay, and excellent music make it another solid addition to the platform.
Turnip Boy Robs A Bank
Played on
Xbox Series X (primary) & PC
PROS
- Fantastic Music
- Plays Well
- Just Long Enough
- Looks Great
CONS
- Looks Great
- Difficulty Spikes
- No Replayability
