A Radical Reunion
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been shredding through the imaginations of the young and old since 1984. In that time they have starred in a mountain of media ranging from comics, cartoons, movies, and of course, games.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown is their latest outing – and while it isn’t flawless, it’s pretty darn radical.
Unlike your standard Turtles romp, Shredder is long gone and the Turtles have splintered after the loss of their father. Yet the Foot Clan is still stirring up all kinds of trouble. The question is whether the four disparate brothers can find a way to work together and uncover what Foot are plotting – and, naturally, save the day.
As far as narratives go, it does just enough to keep you invested over the game’s relatively short 5-hour runtime. That being said, it certainly isn’t the focus of Tactical Takedown.
Raising Shell
Where Tactical Takedown shines is in its combat. This is a turn-based brawler with a sharp focus on battlefield manipulation, positioning, and momentum. Each stage drops one of your four Turtles into a compact combat arena, and your job is to use their unique skillset to wade through waves of Foot.
Each enemy behaves differently and dancing between them while unleashing killer combos quickly becomes the main draw. Planning out your turn in such a way that you KO as many Foot while staying out of range of retaliatory strikes is as engaging as it is thrilling. So much so that Tactical Takedown feels less like a tactics game, and more like an arcade brawler donning a mask.
Meet The Turtles
Each mission stars a different Turtle, and each Turtle plays drastically differently from the next. Michelangelo doesn’t have the best damage, but is devilishly fast and has plenty of displacement abilities. Donatello can rack up massive turns by setting up traps and chaining KOs to gain more actions. Raphael is the most aggressive of the bunch, diving head-first into combat and chaining attacks into radical displays of violence. Finally, Leonardo packs the highest damage and combines powerful buffs to sidestep enemies and deliver devastating blows. They’re not perfectly balanced, but they’re all distinct, and that diversity keeps things fresh.
Despite their differences, stages largely play out in the same way. You will start in a small arena, which gradually expands as more and more enemies spawn in. As the level expands, previous areas will vanish giving Tactical Takedown a real sense of momentum. The edges of any given arena are also sheer drops into the abyss. As you are frantically moving around each level, you can use the edges of the map to push enemies to their doom, giving you more options to deal with your opponents.
Positioning becomes a key part of your strategy almost immediately. Enemies take bonus damage when they collide with obstacles or each other. Certain levels feel tailor made to encourage experimentation with pushes and pulls, and when you take those principles outside of those setpieces, your tactical options quickly expand.
Bogus Difficulty
Unfortunately the sheer breadth of options available to you at any given time results in the game’s difficulty curve tanking. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown is not a challenging game, and even with its short run time, it felt like more could have been done to push the player.
By the time the game’s 20 levels were over, the mechanical spark that drove the early portions had well and truly died out. Considering the game was only 5 hours, this was a bit disappointing.
One way Tactical Takedown could have mixed things up in the later stages would be to expand the game to allow you to run more than one Turtle. Alas, this never happens and the brothers remain divided for the entire run time, which feels like a missed opportunity. Allowing players to combine each Turtle’s skillset could have been a thematic and mechanical highlight.
Visual Pop
Presentation is a similar story. The comic-inspired visuals pop, and the stop-motion-style animations – with characters frozen mid-swing like miniatures on a game board – lend the action a unique charm. On the other hand, environmental variety is seriously lacking. Sewer, street, rooftop, subway – rinse and repeat with slight deviations in order.
Paired with the shallow difficulty, it makes the final stretch feel repetitive.
A Solid Brawler That Lacks a Final Flourish
When all is said and done, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown is a solid but limited experience. The core of the game is a joy to mess around with even if it fails to fully capitalise on the systems given to you. Had more been done to expand the latter half of the game through increased difficulty, stage variety, and multi-Turtle missions, Tactical Takedown could have been stellar.
As it stands, it’s worth checking out if you are a fan of the source material or fancy diving into some Saturday-morning brawling.
Important Links
It’s Pizza Time! Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown Arrives on Xbox and Nintendo Switch – https://www.thexboxhub.com/its-pizza-time-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-tactical-takedown-arrives-on-xbox-and-nintendo-switch/
Buy TMNT: Tactical Takedown on Xbox and Play Anywhere – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-tactical-takedown/9n0bwmt6rkfr
