Over the years, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have tried their hands – or flippers, I guess? – at numerous video game genres. There’s been Turtle inspired side-scrolling beat ‘em ups, one-on-one fighters, platformers, a light gun shooter, and a roguelike. Heck, even the pinball genre has been taken on by the awesome foursome. Now, with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown, the brothers are giving turn-based strategy a go.
The brothers have fallen out and gone their separate ways, again, which is a popular and often regurgitated plot device for Turtles’ films, TV shows, and comics, but here it provides developer Strange Scaffold with the opportunity to teach the player the tactical idiosyncrasies for each solo ninja, before bringing them together for a bombastic finale. Each grid-based level sees a turtle nunchuck their way from one end to the other, bashing the hordes of bad guys they meet on their way.
In a neat touch, to avoid the potentially plodding pace of a TBS, a sense of dynamic urgency is created as each level begins to rapidly fall away as you progress through it, forcing you to keep moving forward at all times. Dilly-dally in one place too long and the ground will fall away beneath your Turtle’s shell, sending them plummeting into the void. Thankfully, there’s a pleasing tactical component provided by this, as each turtle has several attacks that knock enemies backwards. Get yourself into the right position with your limited number of action points and you can send packs of enemies to their demise in one satisfying scenery smashing moment.
And you’ll certainly need every strategic advantage you can get, as Tactical Takedown is a surprisingly challenging game. This game is based upon the Nickelodeon division of the Ninja Turtles empire, so it’s ostensibly aimed at kids. Well, that’s not the case for Tactical Takedown, which keeps the pressure on throughout, sending vast swathes of new enemies every turn, forcing you to use each of the Turtles’ abilities with precision to have any chance of success. One mistake and it’s game over.
In truth, things get rather grindy, the never-ending baddies popping into existence faster than you can clear the decks, turning proceedings into a real slog, particularly in the latter stages. Matters aren’t helped by the game doing a poor job of explaining its mechanics, likely leading to many players bouncing off the frequent difficulty spikes.
Stick with it through its runtime of a handful of hours, and you’ll discover a smart and ultimately satisfying strategy game. And when the gameplay mechanics click, and you have a perfect turn in which your turtle flips, hacks, slides, and dropkicks their way through a multitude of foot ninjas, you can’t help but have a good time. It’s just a shame that I could never quite get on with the visuals. Tactical Takedown is a digital recreation of a board game. As such, there is little to no animation, each character plonking around the place like a pawn on a chess board. This stylistic choice lessened the experience for me. Sure, the game is telling me that Michelangelo just ollied on his skateboard over the head of some goons, striking them as he went, but it doesn’t want to show me that. All I saw was one static piece leaping over another static piece. For some, this lack of animation and characterisation might be no big deal, but it left me cold.