Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tactical Takedown review — the shell of a greater game, but not the substance

TMNT Tactical Takedown is bursting with unrealized potential. The turn based tactical RPG has the bones of a greater experience, but none of the polish or follow-through that would complement those fundamentals. The board game/diorama aesthetics are nice, and there’s some fun to be had kicking around a series of featureless goons, but well before you start to feel like the game delivers anything satisfying or strategic, it’s over. While the Remix mode adds some extra features and longevity, it can’t overcome how far this game falls from its own potential.

Tactical Takedown is a turn-based tactics game, playing out over 20 short levels. Your characters and enemies enter the fray as miniatures, punctuating every movement with a different static stance. The levels are boxy and rectangular, feeling much like a board game, with elements coming in or disappearing as rounds go by. Each level wants you to keep moving, as it will instantly kill all enemies remaining in redundant sections once they leave the stage. Missions are uniformly repetitive: keep yourself moving, fight anything you come across, and end the stage once you’ve knocked out a few red highlighted priority enemies.

Each level sees you play as a different member of the TMNT family, with their own sets of abilities, action points, and 3 continues. The abilities generally see you moving, attacking, inflicting status effects or traps, and pushing enemies. The pushes are the most reliable abilities in the game; because every level is so small, you can push nearly anything off, killing them instantly. Except for rare unmovable enemies that don’t appear until late into the game, this is the most efficient way to use your action points. A 5 health enemy will go down in one hit, saving immense time and resources.

The turtles each have some different moves, but there’s little in the way of real strategy here. Usually the time/action limit will see you taking the most efficient move, which narrows it down to very few options. Maybe you can use one move to inflict a status and another to take the ninja down, but usually that’s the same as hitting them twice. There is a little more going on with certain status effects or situations, but the game is so easy and so repetitive that it’s rare for you to have to think about your options at all. In my ~5 hours of gametime I got no game overs, and maybe lost 3 lives in total. Occasionally you’ll find something to spice up the encounter, like a sudden rush of enemies, helpful townies like Shotgun Granny or a poison floor, but these events are rare and so lacking in impact that they don’t meaningfully change your thinking. As you defeat enemies, you charge a meter with special attacks or debuffs to hit broader groups.

Multiple kills in a given round build up a combo meter. That meter contributes to overall score, which reduces as you use continues, but none of it builds up to anything substantial. There’s no grading system for levels, and they’re so similar and easy that I can’t see wanting to dive back in to moderately increase efficiency. The scoring does, in a small way, affect the credits you use to buy more abilities. But again, those abilities are rarely useful or exciting enough to matter, and the repetitive, easy encounters don’t demand you pay any real attention to your loadout. The vast majority of the time you’re facing the same two or three ninjas and the same two or three robots, in the same few environments. It’s also worth mentioning that the game doesn’t tell you that the shop exists. You could easily click Next after each level and beat the entire thing before seeing that option and expanding your moveset.

The variety and strategy suffer most from one of the game’s oddest design decisions: you only ever fight alone. In terms of game design and theme, this is a massive letdown. Many of your abilities are useless because they require so much set up that you don’t need to bother with them, but a team of characters would change that dynamic substantially. One turtle pushing an enemy into another’s AOE attack, or building off of status effects, would go a long way towards adding replayability and strategy to the game. Parties are a staple of tactics RPGs for good reason, and this one in particular is a licensed TMNT game. You know, those four close-knit family members trained together, who (apparently) never once fought in the same room together at the same time? Why use this genre or this license this way? The actual TMNT board game has similar features, but has the characters literally sharing action resources together. This has one of the same VERY similar looking turtle models going through the same poses against the same enemies.

Visually, this game looks nice. The cartoonish, blocky textures fit in well with the board game aesthetic, but it can be hard to tell given the limited camera. You can circle left and right, but that’s it. No zooming in or out and no changing the angle. If there’s anything special about these designs or details, you’re never going to know about it from your birdseye view.

In terms of story, there’s nothing to discuss. It’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Some ninjas show up, you fight the ninjas, then it’s over. There were visual novel style text boxes between levels, but nothing in them that’s worth mentioning.

I think my frustration with this game comes from the fact that it isn’t just bad. There are glimmers of interest buried within it. Sometimes you’ll juggle an enemy and trigger a special ability, and for a moment feel like this could have been something special. It was just as I started to think I might like the game, that it had better ideas to offer, that I realized its scant 20 missions were about to be over. I’ve played more than a few tactics games, both those with longer narratives and those with procedural generation. On both accounts, I felt more challenged and more intrigued than anything I got from Tactical Takedown.

The designers do deserve some credit for the free Remix mode. The main game has no difficulty options or New Game+, but Remix lets you replay levels with new enemy varieties and borders to prevent kicking everything off the side. It’s encouraging that they know the game needs some more meat on its bones, but the problems run too deep for a few level options to fix. This needs to be longer, more varied, and include more characters and enemy types at the minimum to be worthy of a recommendation. At $20 you could do worse for a short game, but you could also do far, far better. We live in an age of accessible roguelikes with high replayability that Tactical Takedown doesn’t offer. Into the Breach, Wildfrost, and Cobalt Core are all as expensive or cheaper. For that matter, a roguelike version of this game would be very enticing. It does offer some fun as you bop around levels eating wayward pizzas and punching robots, but nothing stimulates your sense of challenge or sense of adventure.