The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are in the midst of, pardon the pun, a video game renaissance. In the last few years alone we’ve received the excellent retro compilation Cowabunga Collection, the retro-style brawler Shredder’s Revenge, and the Hades-inspired roguelike Splintered Fate. Not since their breakout success on Saturday morning cartoons have the turtles been so ubiquitous in games, but this time around, developers are more emboldened to experiment with different game styles. Enter TMNT: Tactical Takedown, a grid-based tactics game that feels both authentically nostalgic and like creative new ground for the heroes. While it suffers slightly from a limited scope, the short adventure is a great time while it lasts.
Tactical Takedown is presented with a clean, bright visual style reminiscent of the old Saturday morning cartoon. The turtles’ beaks are rounded just like you drew on your Trapper Keeper during geometry class. But this story takes place well after the original series–Splinter and Shredder are both dead, and the boys’ relationship has grown contentious as they’ve all gone in different directions and coped with the loss. The combination of Saturday morning aesthetics with this new story premise make this feel like a progression of that continuity and an opportunity to show us something new.
It’s also the conceit for the game’s core mechanic, which limits you to one turtle at a time as you fight your way through legions of Foot Clan goons. Objectives are usually to survive a certain number of turns or to defeat certain starred enemies. The stages are isometric grids like you’ve seen in lots of tactics games, but limiting you to one character at a time means a lot of focus on prioritization and crowd control. You’re always outnumbered, but they’re always outmatched. The stages are designed with a particular turtle in mind, which is explained by the story: Donatello is investigating happenings underground, so each of his stages take place in the sewer, while Raphael’s take place across the rooftops, and so on. These differences are mostly cosmetic, but some are more substantial. Hopping along rooftops of a Raphael stage requires you to reach the edge of one roof to clear another, for example, and Donatello’s sewer stages are rife with toxic waste which is, thankfully, purple.
Like the stages, the power sets of the turtles are neatly differentiated according to their personalities, which is a heck of a trick considering they all need to be capable of handling waves of enemies on their own. Michelangelo is particularly acrobatic, as his abilities focus mostly on leaping over enemies to do damage and juggle them. Raph, meanwhile, is super aggressive, gaining an extra action point every time he KOs an enemy. Leonardo has very limited range but he’s a powerhouse, since each enemy he KOs gives him a stack of “Radical” energy to make his next attack stronger. My personal favorite, in the cartoon and this game, was Donatello, who has extended reach thanks to his bo staff, along with a stun bomb that electrifies a section of floor and makes it deadly ground against enemies. Paired with his kunai, which can stun an enemy into staying in place, he’s the most defensive fighter, able to turn the battlefield hazardous and then force enemies to stay put.
And while the battlefields would seem to be similar to any other tactics game, this TMNT iteration gives them a kinetic twist. The stages themselves “mutate” over time, as new areas of the battlefield open up and others fall away. Anyone (including you) stuck in a red zone when it cycles out is instantly killed, and this clever twist encourages you to keep moving. Other times, hazards like cars will drive across the field, damaging anything in their path. You can even sometimes knock enemies off the edges of stages.
It’s a tactics game that feels infused with the spirit of the classic arcade brawlers, even down to a giant “GO!” appearing on-screen when a piece of the level is about to cycle out. Leonardo’s stages, which largely take place across subway tunnels, are the best example of the concept. You’ll be fighting among benches at the station, and then see a subway car pull up, move into it, and then sense the train “speed” away when the station disappears.
The story focuses on the turtles’ frustration with each other, and it’s relatable without ever feeling too self-serious. The writing gets at the heart of their relationships, showing that they have real affection for each other even if they tend to get on each others’ nerves. And it captures the characters themselves very well, like how underneath the gruff exterior Raph is a big soft-shell for his brothers.
The story of bickering brothers reconciling to take on a threat to the city is predictable, but well done. However, the gameplay application of it felt somewhat underwhelming. When the turtles do join forces, you’re still just playing as a single character. Tactical Takedown finds a clever and heartfelt way to illustrate the idea, but it still felt like a head-fake from what the game had been building up to. This may just be a product of its limited scope, but I had been envisioning coming up with complex strategies that would reward my familiarity with all four turtles’ abilities. Instead, what I got was essentially a single super-powered combo character.
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Similarly, the ability to swap loadouts feels half-baked. You can purchase extra abilities for the turtles in the shop, using points accrued from your campaign missions. But the shop is never front-and-center in the campaign menu, so it’s very easy to miss it entirely while making your way through the missions. I bought a few abilities but mostly made my way through the campaign using the default kits. I never felt like I needed to really shift my strategy or try different abilities, because the missions were perfectly doable without using the shop at all. The handful of options for each turtle seemed aimed at giving each of them a secondary strategic hook, but they didn’t feel vital.
Imagine sitting on the floor in front of your TV watching the pilot episode for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the 1990s, and that’s how it feels to play TMNT: Tactical Takedown. All the elements are there, you had a great time while it lasted, but you can sense it’s really the rock-solid foundation for something much grander. The game itself is a great distillation of some radical concepts, but it also feels like it’s straining against its own limitations. Nonetheless, this is a great start to what I can only hope becomes another way to spend time with the turtles.
