Mutant

The Turtles have a long history in video games, and the spectrum of quality for those projects is all over the place. Strange Scaffold has opted for a novel departure from expectation with Tactical Takedown, taking the four radical green brothers into a grid-based tactical affair that still aims for a sense of high movement and excitement. Production values are limited, and the game’s scope is small, but fans can find a lot to enjoy in this turn-based adventure.

In this variation of the familiar setup, Splinter and Shredder are dead by the time the story begins, and the teenage ninja brothers are each confronting and grieving that reality in their way. The story setup establishes that each Turtle is off doing their own thing, but in a story and set up about a family working together, it’s an unusual choice that the entire game that follows has you controlling only one character at a time. A late-game addition attempts to confront that narrative disconnect, but it still feels strange to play a whole TMNT game and never see the heroes together.

While it’s an odd choice for a tactics game about a family of warriors, in practice, changing playable characters each level keeps things fresh. Michelangelo is about mobility, Raphael likes to push the attack, Donatello plays with traps and debuffs, and Leo is about power and evasion. Each skill in battle helps to differentiate the playstyles, and over time, you can use accrued points to buy additional powers, though I found that the initial mix of abilities led to clear synergies that were hard to abandon.

The 20 stages hop between locales like the sewers, subways, and city streets. But the square grid boards always lean into two core ideas – constant forward motion and a seemingly insurmountable number of enemies that you somehow manage to overcome. In tandem, those two things bring life and energy to the game and keep me having a good time. Traditional tactics games often encourage the use of cover. But in keeping with the “Ninja” part of the game’s name, Tactical Takedown requires that you dart in and out of range of attackers while steadily advancing across a battlefield that will fall away beneath your feet if you don’t move forward. The resulting momentum communicates a sense of speed and action, even as you navigate a static turn order.

Especially early on, battles can prove quite challenging until you wrap your head around each character’s specialties. That difficulty is at odds with the colorful, childlike nature of the presentation. With time, I warmed to the flow of fights and the intriguing puzzle of figuring out how to take out so many Foot Clan soldiers in one blazing turn of play.

While the simple character illustrations appropriately call back to Saturday morning vibes, the overall visual palette of the game doesn’t hit the mark. The rotatable isometric view recalls a miniature board game, but there are too few animations, too little detail on environments, and an overall generic feel that doesn’t do the game any favors. Even so, the interstitial pop-up dialogue boxes between levels capture the essence of the Turtles’ wholesome family drama. I smiled as the game rolled out long-established tropes like Donnie’s genius and Leo’s angsty leadership, as if watching an old cartoon episode play out in written snippets.

Even as a brief game of only a few hours, I felt ready for things to wrap up by the time I hit the credits, but that’s not an indictment of how it all came together. Instead, this new tactical twist on the Turtles knows not to overstay its welcome. It’s a bite-sized chunk of strategic fun with an evident love of these classic characters that shines through, and that’s worth plenty.

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