Review: Turnip Boy Robs a Bank takes a step toward Roguelite, but a step back from coziness

Turnip Boy Robs a Bank seemed like a no-brainer for me since I reviewed the former title, Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion just a few months ago. You don’t really have to know what happened in that game because this one offers a small re-cap and the similarities are down to characters and art alone.

For this title, they took us away from the Legend of Zelda nature of running around a map and dropped us into a repetitive Turnip Boy version of Roguelite Groundhog’s Day. 

WARNING: For those sensitive to flashing lights, I’d recommend skipping this one. I don’t have photosensitivity, so I didn’t notice anything too bad, but the game does warn for it in the very beginning. So, please make your choices on whether to play this game or not with your health in mind. 

Gameplay and Controls

Turnip Boy Robs a Bank is supposed to take place 2 days after the end of Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion. If you want to read that review, I’ve linked it in the prior sentence, but the important thing to know is that the difficulty of the last-level boss was scaled up ridiculously. I wasn’t able to beat the final boss, so I don’t know how the prior game ended.

Turnip Boy Robs a Bank talks a lot about a war that displaced a lot of people. But, that doesn’t seem to be the focus of the game. Your sole goal in the early stages is to rob a bank over and over and over again. 

You start in a warehouse run by the Pickle Gang whom you’ve decided to join up with. In this case, you have four things that you can do. You can upgrade damage, the size of your bag, and your luck in finding better weapons, just to name a few. 

A different NPC has a small arsenal that you can pull from consisting of one sword and three guns, while another NPC will take any interesting weapons dropped by cops to research. 

The last NPC is a scientist that we met in the prior game whose sole purpose is to connect us to the dark web where we can buy things like C4 and a laser pointer. These items help us break into vaults and safes, but once you buy them, the web doesn’t seem to replenish. She’s kind of useless since any of these items could have gone into the other NPCs, but perhaps she has a function later. 

Once you have what you need, you jump into the van and watch a cutscene of it barrel straight into the bank. Turnip Boy pops out of the vehicle and then runs around the main lobby, hitting cops, shaking down veggies for their money, and finding objects of value. You’ll notice some elevators that take you to different floors, but this is where things get stale quickly.

These elevators aren’t predictable. You don’t get to decide what room pops up for you, so you’ll have to run through this same pathing repeatedly to get to different rooms and hope you make progress.

Oh, and you only have 2-3 minutes to do this. Once you run out of time, you have to head back to the van or get your ass handed to you. If you die, you lose half of your stolen goods. After the time limit, police rain down from a dropped rope generally in threes. So, you don’t want to get caught up here early on.

I made the mistake of trying to wait it out only to find out that after about 5 minutes of dealing with the barrage of police, the level will get poison pumped into it. If you’re not using God Mode (more on that later), you’re getting about half a heart of damage every few seconds from area effect and you’re screwed.

This game is not designed to be played linearly and that’s where it lost me. The repetition of having to go through the same lobby, the same hall, and so on made it less about strategy and more about luck. 

Thankfully, the devs added an accessibility menu to the options. A big criticism of the last game was that the final boss was scaled in difficulty too high, so to combat that, we have some options. This menu lets you choose to auto-aim, deal greater damage, and even lets you pick God Mode. In God Mode, you won’t take damage. It’s with this mode that I learned about the poison gas they pump in to force you back to the warehouse.

While being able to run through without worrying about damage definitely helped, it still just wasn’t all that fun.

Art and Sound

The art style is the same as the prior game, so it’s familiar and just as nice as Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion. And while I certainly enjoy this style immensely, I didn’t feel as if we saw anything particularly new in it. Obviously, all the assets relating to the bank were new, but there wasn’t really a freshness in the design.

What I can say was exceptional, however, was the music. If you’re familiar with my reviews, you know that music has to be pretty damned good for it not to get muted early on. While Turnip Boy Robs a Bank does have some shorter songs, they revolve around each other rather than repeat. 

I really enjoyed the almost 80s electronica vibe that it had going on. It was definitely one of the best aspects of the game, all around.

Coziness and Cons

The cozy vibes have potential if you don’t mind the repetitive nature of the game. For a shooter, it’s fairly chill, especially when you can turn on auto-aim. However, I found that it just never chilled enough to find anything relaxing.

The time limit really lent itself to a higher-octane vibe that never mellowed. In terms of coziness, the first game was far cozier. So, if you haven’t played either game in the Turnip Boy series, I’d recommend playing that one… and, maybe, only that one. 

As far as cons go, I feel like the biggest issue is the forced repetition. Something as simple as adding checkpoints would have helped this game so much. No one wants to run around the same lobby every single time. 

Aside from that, having only two slots of inventory meant that having to constantly fumble with dropped weapons to see which two could stay was more frustrating than fun.

Lastly, as far as cons, it’s a small one, but I felt like there was very little story driving this narrative. If I’m honest, there wasn’t much in the prior game either. But, in that one, having NPCs in fixed locations that you could get to reliably felt like achieving a goal. Whereas, this game has you relying on chance to find NPCs related to quests and their counterparts. 

Turnip Boy Robs a Bank Verdict

Turnip Boy Robs a Bank feels like a step back for the franchise. It’s not a bad game in the sense of being unplayable and it has some merit for players that like roguelite games. But, it missed a big mark in stifling map progression. 

Kudos to the team for trying something new instead of making a clone of the prior game, but this just didn’t feel like a natural progression to that storyline – especially when they make sure you know it only happens two days later.

For me, it was a miss, but there’s some potential here for roguelite and FPS gamers. If you want to give Turnip Boy Robs a Bank a try, you can find it on Steam, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch for $14.99.