Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown came out last week and, being a turn-based tactics game, I was both personally and professionally obligated to try it out.
How does a series based on TMNT, which famously features loads of melee combat against hordes of shitty enemies, work in a tactics game, a genre usually known for cover, guns and careful planning? It embraces the chaos, asking you to take control of turn-based ninja turtles and spend a whole level running around slashing and smashing things.
To make things a little spicier than just an endless grind of close-quarters combat, Tactical Takedown has what I can best describe as a continually collapsing landscape, where sections of the map will disappear while others appear ahead of you. It's important to note that the game does this regardless of where you are; you don't trigger the collapse, it just happens to you in the middle of a fight, with the idea (I assume) being it continually ushers you through a level as though you were flying through a stage from Konami's classic 1989 beat-em-up.
It makes the game breathless in its own turn-based way, as you can never just bunker down behind cover and get in a leisurely shootout. Since you're always taking damage (it's melee combat against a lot of bad guys, you can't avoid it) you have to always be moving to kill enemies and always be jumping to grab health items and always be thinking and always worrying about the impending collapse of the tiles you're currently standing on. I dig the idea! Any attempt to try something fresh with an established genre like this should be applauded, because as you might expect given how many turn-based games are called "XCOM-like", innovation can sometimes be in short supply.
In this particular game's case, though...this is not what I play these kinds of games for. I am a languid gamer, an enjoyer of turn-based games for the serenity and contemplation they allow, and the amount of stuff Tactical Takedown was throwing in my face the entire time was just too much, too damn stressful. It often felt overwhelming in ways that I am actively trying to avoid with this genre, yet which in turn felt wasted on a game where everyone had to wait their turn instead of just going at it.
Not helping things are a lack of variety once the game's basics are laid out to you in the first couple of levels, and a few too many cut corners in terms of presentation. I'm not demanding AAA standards from my low-fi tactics games, but for something with a half-decent license, and which is drawing inspiration from one of the best-looking video games of the late 80s, the static visuals--the game looks more like a tabletop experience, with animation in short supply--were a little disappointing.
I get the design lure of bringing one game or genre's vibe into another--I've literally done this myself!--and appreciate there may be many others who are far less precious about their genre expectations than I, but for me, here, the two just weren't a great fit, no mater how interesting the foundational idea might have been.
