TMNT: Tactical Takedown review: The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game you didn't know you needed

Even the game director, Xalavier Nelson Jr., has difficulty believing they let his team at Strange Scaffold tell this story. You might know Strange Scaffold for some of the best indie action games of the last few years. Last year, I Am Your Beast challenged players to improve their times on difficult first-person shooter puzzles. A few years earlier, El Paso, Elsewhere felt like if Max Payne was a vampire hunter. So, to learn that this indie studio known for making unexpected hits was making a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, it was hard to believe.

Then, I learned that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown would be a turn-based tactics game. It would follow the story of the maturing turtles after their mentor, Master Splinter, and their arch-nemesis, Shredder, have been killed. So not only is this unique indie team getting the chance to work with a popular license, but they are taking the story in a drastic direction that has never been seen in visual media before, at least to my knowledge. What does a Ninja Turtles story look like without Master Splinter? Without Shredder?

Thankfully, Strange Scaffold let me find out for myself. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t trust this incredible studio to take a familiar, well-explored intellectual property, do something revolutionary, and blow everything out of the water. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown is a perfect blend of quick, engaging tactical battles, a tense story about family, growing up, and learning to live with grief, all tied together with a killer soundtrack. I can’t believe I’m saying this about a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, but it might be one of my favorite games of the year.

Shell Yeah

Let’s get one thing straight. I am a huge TMNT fan. Some of my earliest memories are of watching those 1990s movies. They may have terrible Rotten Tomatoes scores now, but I will keep the fond memories with me forever. I watched several of the animated TV show incarnations and enjoyed 2023’s Mutant Mayhem. But besides that, I’ve also greatly enjoyed Dotemu and Tribute Games’ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, the side-scrolling beat ‘em up released in 2022. For the most part, as a TMNT fan, I am used to the content being fairly hit or miss. I was not expecting to be so blown away by this game.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown starts as the Foot Clan invades the turtles' home in the sewers. Michelangelo is the only one at home. Since Master Splinter ed away, the brothers have grown apart. Raphael has teamed up with Casey Jones to form a detective agency, while Leonardo acts as a solo vigilante, proving his strength in the world on his own. Michelangelo fights his way out of the ambush (that’s where you come in), leaving the Foot to loot their home. Meanwhile, the rest of the brothers encounter enemies all across the city. Somehow, the Foot has coordinated strikes everywhere, thanks to their new leader, Karai.

The narrative is divided into four parts, each with a handful of chapters following the brothers as they defend the city and try to stop Karai’s plans. The brothers have drifted apart after losing their mentor, and through all the chaos, they have to learn to work together again. Leonardo, in particular, puts too much pressure on himself to be the new leader in the wake of Splinter’s absence, and will have to learn some hard lessons. The story here isn’t groundbreaking, but it gives a new perspective on characters we’ve seen many times before. How do the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles adapt to life when they won’t be teenagers much longer?

I don’t want to spoil the story, but you won't be let down if you’re a fan of these characters. Despite the new direction, it feels like Strange Scaffold has been writing these characters for years.

Game Night in New York City

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown does not look like any other game I can think of. The core gameplay revolves around turn-based tactical battles. As one of the turtles, you have a certain number of actions on your turn. You can use this to move or use one of the turtle's various attacks, then once you’ve run out of actions, you end your turn, and the remaining enemies take turns moving closer to you and attacking. So far, pretty standard tactical fare. But the art style makes it stand out.

Every character is a tabletop miniature rather than a sprite. They even have circular stands that a real-life miniature would need to balance on a table. The characters change pose and react when they make a move or something happens, but they don’t return to a standard idle pose. After moving, Michelangelo remains mid-ollie on his skateboard until you select another action. When you knock out an enemy, they rigidly tumble to the ground and fly off their stand. The commitment to this unique art style, down to the thump sound when new enemies drop onto the battlefield, makes the whole experience feel like an elaborate board game set up rather than a video game.

The constantly shifting battlefields compound this tabletop feel. Rather than each mission taking place on a static location, the ground falls away, and new areas appear as the mission progresses. It comes and goes like building blocks, quickly adding or subtracting to the available space around you. The game warns you when an area is about to fall away, giving you the chance to move to safety, but also push or trap enemies in those areas, effectively eliminating them at the end of the turn. Every turtle has some way to push, pull, or stick foes. Knocking enemies off the side or into oncoming danger was how I dealt with 75% of enemies, rather than actually whittling down their health bar.

Because every battlefield has these small, shifting, dynamic areas, it should break the immersion, but I almost think that’s the point. Rather than going for something realistic, Tactical Takedown is unabashedly a game. It doesn’t want you to forget that. It has a great story, but the fun comes from using every last move you have to take down an entire room full of enemies, even if it’s just knocking them off the table.

Turtle Tactics

Of course, I couldn’t get through this review without talking more in-depth about the tactical gameplay. You can drop into any location on the map at the start of each mission. Every turtle has a loadout of attack and movement options. Given the game's predisposition to let you knock enemies off the side of the battlefield, all of the turtles have some way to knock enemies back a space or two. As you complete missions, you build a currency that lets you unlock new moves that can be swapped out depending on your preference. It’s easy to keep hitting “next” at the end of the missions, but I encourage you to take a break and explore other options that become available to you (at least between every couple of missions).

All four turtles play similarly enough that it’s easy to jump from one to the other, but they also manage to make them all stand out, just like their personalities. Michelangelo’s kit is focused on moving around, jumping over enemies, and he’s the only one whose basic move action is “ollie” instead of “jump.” Raphael is very melee-focused, with moves that let him charge recklessly into battle and sometimes sacrifice his hit points for extra damage and movement. Donatello can use gadgets and his long-reaching bo staff to control the battlefield, keeping enemies locked down or punishing them for moving. And finally, Leonardo has a good balance of melee and ranged attacks, but can also reliably give himself buffs to deal extra damage and dodge attacks.

There are so many great opportunities and challenges presented by each mission. There’s nothing better than getting into a flow state, seeing the moves laid out in front of you, and perfectly knocking out a group of opponents with every move in your arsenal. One of my favorite missions was where Donatello had to defend an area while his tech produced an algorithm to predict the Foot’s next move. Enemies swarmed the battlefield as the number of turns slowly ticked down. Donatello has a move that creates electrical fields on several squares. Any enemy entering that square took a point of damage. Also, since this took place in the sewer, any enemy standing in the water would take a point of poison damage. I was able to fortify a corner of the map through poison water and electricity, and use Donnie’s kunai to force enemies to stay put, thus taking more damage from the poison and electricity. Despite most of the game being about quickly moving around a shifting battlefield, they still managed to make a more stationary fight a ton of fun, too.

Final Thoughts

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown is a brief experience. It only took me about five and a half hours to reach the end credits. Replays are encouraged. There are new moves to unlock, and each mission has a “Radical” score to try to reach. On one hand, I appreciate it not taking too long and being a well-contained and well-paced experience, but I also want more of this game. Five hours is both perfect and too short at the same time.

I don’t have many complaints about Tactical Takedown. But, I will say that after completing the story, I have a hard time convincing myself to go back and replay missions for high scores. I don’t think that’s a major problem because it’s a phenomenal game to play once. It doesn’t need to have replayability, but I can feel it wanting to have it. Maybe this will be great for the right player, but it could have also been approached differently. One last thing I’ll mention is that some of the UI, while perfectly stylized and colorful, can be confusing to navigate. Particularly when changing the loadouts. It took me some time to realize what I needed to do. Nothing major though.

Finally, I wasn’t sure where exactly to put this, but I have to shout out Tactical Takedown’s composer, RJ Lake, who also composed the soundtrack for I Am Your Beast. The main menu track perfectly establishes the game’s vibe. For some reason, one part of that song makes me feel like I am in the lobby of the world’s best laser tag. The neon colors, the constant pizza imagery, and, I suppose, the heavy nostalgia of growing up with these characters all add to that aesthetic. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown almost feels like a game made specifically for me.