Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tactical Takedown proves that sometimes the wildest mash-ups just work. You’d never expect certain genres to blend, yet when they do, the result can be pure magic. That was the case in 2024 when Metal Slug Tactics revived its franchise through an unlikely fusion, and it’s happening again this year. Developer Strange Scaffold has worked wonders by throwing the heroes in a half shell into their own turn-based strategy title—one that, surprisingly, still plays like a beat-em-up.
Behold, for I give you Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tactical Takedown!
In time-honoured Turtles tradition, the Foot Clan are mucking about and causing trouble all across New York City. With the Shredder out of the picture, his daughter Karai has come to town to make life miserable for everyone. The Turtles have their own issues as they’re currently separated from each other, making the fight against the Foot an uphill battle. Will they be able to sort their brotherly issues out and come together before the Foot’s final plan is realised?
Tactical Takedown takes you from the rooftops of NYC, to its traffic-filled streets and down, down into its mucky sewers for a rock-em-sock-em brawl against legions of evil Ninjas. And legions is the keyword here as the Foot throw everything they have at you in a thrilling, tactical battle between offence, defence and outright survival.
Each level drops you into the shell of one of the Turtle boys with the goal of making it from one end of the level to the other or surviving a specified number of rounds. Of course, it’s not that easy as the Foot flood the screen with each turn, and you have to manage with a certain amount of hit points and Action Points per turn. You’ve got three lives per level, but much-needed fresh pizza pops up every now and then to refill your health points.
The developers haven’t just gotten the Turtles characters down pat in the game’s writing, but also in how each character plays with a skills load-out that complements their personalities. Mikey travels around on a skateboard, which gives him further movement range than his brothers while letting him deal damage to enemies when kick-flipping over them. Raphael deals in heavy-hitting attacks and AOE’s. Donatello is more offensive-oriented with a bunch of gadgets that can electrify sections of the playfield, for instance, and Leonardo deals in swift KOs that fuel his dodge ability.
Initially, you only have a small load-out to choose from, but as you progress, you’ll earn points to buy new skills to mix and match to your play-style. Additionally, each Turtle can fill up a support gauge that pulls in a drone to deal damage or stat effects depending on which Turtle it’s meant to emulate. Sadly, the game misses out on the opportunity to have you commanding a full squad of the brothers, but it does have the added wrinkle of making sure each level is a tightrope to walk between offence and defence. You can’t play specifically to either extreme, or you will get pummeled.
Level design is a key highlight here, as the world can be just as deadly or helpful if you manage it right. The game’s arcade brawling roots also show up here in the form of environmental effects such as speeding cars, helpful pedestrians, falling objects and giant “Go” signs still pop up to keep you moving forward. The most interesting aspect of the world is its mutational design that ties into the game’s boardgame-like visuals.
You start off on small parts of the board, with the level dropping new board pieces in or out as you advance through a stage. There’s always a rush to be moving forward as new pieces of the level drop in because if you or any enemies are on the parts that drop out, it’s instant KO. This aspect can be used tactically as well by either knocking enemies off the board or getting them all to line up in front of a speeding car or a tile that’s about to fall before moving to a new space on your last action.
All of these design choices, along with a high score counter per level and a combo meter that you can build up for defeating enemies in a row, really reinforce that beat-em-up feel, even if it’s one in which I have to weigh my options beforehand.
The game’s visuals are one area in which I wasn’t initially thrilled. The visual look is that of a stripped-back back game with each character represented by miniature standees that change poses for each action performed. Initially, I wasn’t thrilled with this design choice and the basic level of detail afforded to the game’s tilesets, but the more I played, the more it grew on me and the more I appreciated just how much it fits the Switch.
I really ended up enjoying the way the models change poses for each action or turn to align themselves to whichever tile you’re looking at moving to. There’s something irrepressibly charming about watching Mikey’s model switch into a kick-flip pose after a move, or the way in which enemies get knocked off the board, their bases and character models flying in different directions when you knock them out.
How difficult Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tactical Takedown is is something that will be up for debate. As a novice strategy title player, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tactical Takedown had me playing through stages multiple times before I beat it (admittedly, part of that was me not grasping the best ways to use the move-sets initially), which gave me a pretty decent difficulty workout and play length. I can’t imagine veteran RTS players being too heavily vexed by it, but if, on the chance that you’re looking for a stiffer challenge, there is a Remix mode that ups the difficulty while changing up the enemy sets.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tactical Takedown may be a relatively short (relative to your experience that is) dive into the tactics genre for our favourite reptilian mutant heroes, but it’s one that I thoroughly enjoyed and hope to see expanded upon with future games.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Tactical Takedown Trailer
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The publisher provided the game code for us to review the game.
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