Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown (Switch) -Based Brawler Blend

A few times in 2024 I quietly wished the barrage of TMNT titles would ease up. We received three fresh adventures, and even though some doubled down on daring mechanics, the sheer oversaturation wore thin — naturally, a smash like Shredder’s Revenge and a blockbuster film such as Mutant Mayhem will do that.

So you can understand my caution when booting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown, the turn-based reinvention from Strange Scaffold that debuted on PC and now promises another “fresh” spin on the brothers’ foot-soldier formula. I expected yet another promise broken; instead, I walked away humbled.

Tactical Takedown flips all previous assumptions about what a Turtles game should be. At first glance, the slowed grid of a tactics board seems ill-suited to the franchise’s fluid fisticuffs, yet here the flow works perfectly. It’s a compact adventure with a handful of blemishes, but if you’re burnt-out on the IP’s nonstop pummeling, this is the revitalising slice of pepperoni you’ve craved.

Let’s address the headline: yep, it’s turn-based. Tactical Takedown swaps out frantic combos for methodical positioning. Every Turtle enjoys six Action Points each round, spent on sprinting across the arena or clobbering Foot soldiers. Once your bar empties, foes get their retort, leaving you to reap the rewards of genius — or nurse bruises.

The blueprint isn’t revolutionary in the wider tactics landscape, yet it’s groundbreaking for the half-shell crew. Classic fight-club signifiers — the enormous glowing “GO!” arrows — still usher you ahead, and Strange Scaffold has slid them gracefully into the grid so that long-time fans feel right at home even if SRPGs intimidate them.

Observe how the quartet’s trademark playstyles are carried across the battlefield. Mikey prioritises mobility, Raph charges for crushing blows, Donnie hurls tech contraptions from afar, and Leo strings consecutive knock-outs into surgical strikes. You can buy fresh moves and rejig each sibling’s loadout before every stage, though the default toolkits already capture the quartet’s identities admirably.

In past iterations, the balance often tipped toward one clear front-runner (usually Donnie, let’s admit it). This time the roster sits on level pegging, and each chapter spotlights every hero’s strengths and drawbacks in pristine isolation.

“Isolation,” you ask? Correct. The game splits its campaign into four solo storylines, which ensures you wield just one Turtle per outing. Early on this works like a controlled dojo, letting you master each fighter in turn, yet the brothers are at their best when united — it would have been delightful to meld their disparate strategies in later levels.

This hurts even more because the moment-to-moment loop feels sublime. Two fights in I was already chaining dashes, blocks and finishers like a proper shadow warrior; I could only dream of pulling off tag-team maneuvers between the four of them. Touch-screen support is absent — a shame, as a light tap would suit this bite-size tactics design — yet the straightforward button prompts felt smooth enough for greasy-finger snack breaks.

Beyond their forced separation, the studio clearly reveres its source. The plot unfolds like a vintage Saturday-morning serial (Karai and Baxter Stockman tear the city apart post-Shredder, no surprise!) and the writing sparkles with personality—Raph’s turn from hothead to protective big bro stands out especially.

Visually, it leans into a fun tabletop vibe. Metropolis chunks slide into place like puzzle tiles on a game board, enticingly close to the map’s edge so you can punt enemies into the void. Each character manifests as a tiny standee whose stance swaps to match their last attack. The stripped-back animations might polarise purists (I personally ached for idle shuffles), yet the art direction offers a welcome repaint of the familiar shell squad.

However, wrapping up those visuals won’t occupy much of your afternoon. A single pass lasts about five hours, and although you can revisit stages with new gear to chase scoreboards, the framework remains the same and the baseline difficulty is forgiving.

Remix Mode — exclusive to this Switch edition — stretches the mileage a tad, but only partially. Each map restarts at a steeper tier, tossing in altered Foot enemy assortments. The leap is real: I breezed the original campaign with a single KO, whereas Remix handed me my own nunchaku in the first scenario. Even so, it’s ultimately the same map starring the same lone Turtle, reshuffled rather than reimagined.

Replay therefore isn’t Tactical Takedown’s strong suit, and that’s fine. I would’ve gladly signed up for a slightly longer story, yet I’d sooner finish hungry than watch a new formula overstay its welcome.

Conclusion

On paper, jamming grid strategy into Turtle punch-ups sounded like forcing a cube into a circle. In practice, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown fuses the genres to deliver one of the most invigorating takes on the franchise in decades. It’s brief, it’s sweet, and it won’t land for absolutely everyone. But after thirty-five years of relentless brawls, this finally shows the team in a radically new light — and dude, that’s pretty tubular.