The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise has a long, rich history with video games. Over the years, we’ve seen the four brothers take to the streets and sewers of New York in platformers, fighting games, pinball experiences, and roguelites, but the genre most closely associated with the brand is beat-’em-up action. Strange Scaffold, the studio behind games like Clickolding and El Paso, Elsewhere, had a unique idea for tackling a Turtles title while retaining the heart and soul of the IP’s history in games. The result is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown, a game that seamlessly blends the beat-’em-up spirit with the distinct gameplay conventions and mechanics of a turn-based strategy game. I had the opportunity to play several hours of Tactical Takedown and speak with the team behind this unique, yet somehow familiar take on the TMNT brand.
The idea of working on a licensed property first entered Strange Scaffold studio head Xalavier Nelson’s brain in 2020 when he was nearly tapped to become the creative director of a Robocop game. Though that opportunity fell through, Nelson continued thinking about what it would be like to create a game based on a major intellectual property. In the time since then, Strange Scaffold has put out games like El Paso, Elsewhere, Clickolding, An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs, Life Eater, and Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3, which just hit Steam last month.
Despite staying busy with multiple games seemingly in development at any given time, Nelson continued thinking about working on an established franchise. “The idea of eventually taking a Strange Scaffold-like approach to the world of a license with the right partner has been on my mind for a while, but it was mainly looking for the right opportunity, the right partners, and the right universe for that to really be its best,” Nelson says.
That right fit arrived when Nelson connected with Paramount senior vice president, general manager, and head of global games and emerging media Doug Rosen. Nelson felt as though Rosen understood the right way to collaborate with game developers, and it made Nelson want to work with Paramount. After prolonged discussions of, “We should do something together,” Nelson scrolled through Paramount’s IP list in search of the right fit. He ultimately landed on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with which he felt the team could leverage some mechanics it developed during the conceptualization phase of its upcoming turn-based character action game, Teenage Demon Slayer Society. The team retained the turn-based strategy mechanics, but Nelson wanted to keep the heart of the games that TMNT is most well-known for intact.
“It’s the Strange Scaffold way; that’s our brand,” executive producer and writer Manda Farough says. “We take genres and we create really bizarre twists on them. This is not the kind of turn-based strategy game that I even thought could be made. But because we had this incredible camaraderie and teamwork between everybody on our team and our game design being as tight and focused as it has been, the mash-up of genres somehow has coalesced into this turn-based tactical, side-scrolling beat ’em up.”
I was skeptical going into my hands-on session with Tactical Takedown. After all, how do you blend such distinct genres as turn-based strategy and side-scrolling beat ’em ups? After spending hours with the game, I’m still surprised by how well it all works. It all starts with giving your character several action points per turn, rather than just one or two. This allows you to defeat one enemy before beating up the next and strategically position yourself for either the enemies’ turns or your next turn. On top of that, the levels change as you take turns, with older parts falling away and newer sections popping up, forcing you to maintain forward momentum as you dash through the stages.
After trying to replicate strategies I used in more traditional strategy franchises like XCOM and Mario + Rabbids, I failed pretty spectacularly in the first mission, causing me to worry that this game will be more challenging to play than I anticipated. I fell off the stage as it mutated, and ultimately got overwhelmed by a Foot Clan ambush, resulting in Mikey falling in battle. However, after getting to know each character and how they play, I rarely failed a mission.
I enjoyed learning each Turtle’s play style through their specific stages in the first two chapters. Michelangelo’s party-dude persona shines through in his skateboard-based attacks that let him jump over enemies, while Donatello’s bo staff gives him added range, like in the NES game, and his tech brilliance lets him deploy various gadgets. Meanwhile, Raphael’s brawler mentality makes him feel ready to take on the world with attacks that grant extra moves and can even pull enemies to new spots. Leonardo’s leadership abilities and strategic thinking let him become more powerful after defeating an enemy. If you don’t like a certain move in a Turtle’s moveset, you can use currency you earn in-game to purchase new moves and customize their loadouts.
One of the most striking things about TMNT: Tactical Takedown is that you only play as one Turtle at a time, a stark difference from the co-op beat-’em-up classics to which this game so lovingly pays homage. Each Tactical Takedown stage automatically gives you a Turtle to control, allowing the encounters to feel ultra-tailored to that specific Turtle’s moveset. While there are obviously gameplay mechanics that went into that decision, the narrative choices fueled that core idea. Before the game’s events, the Turtles’ world is upside-down, with both Splinter and Shredder dying. The Turtles are somewhat disconnected as they search to find themselves.
“As a writer, what [having one Turtle at a time] forced me to do is rely less on explicit relationship building and really lean into… There are going to be moments in between the moments we’re showing you, and there are going to be conversations that are happening outside of the game, and that helped guide the ways in which we drill down to the essence of those conversations,” Farough says. “Writing an ensemble cast is already so complicated, so having a number of perspectives in the way that we handled character development, both implicitly and explicitly, was really freeing.”
The unique narrative themes were one of the driving forces behind Strange Scaffold’s coming into this project. “I think one of the most under-discussed pieces of the creative world that we now live in is, especially in a time of mega-mash-ups of even different universes coming together, when you have Fortnite putting in every IP, within the next three months or so, it can end up being really under-discussed how every single character has a real weight to them, a gravity if you want to handle them correctly,” Nelson says. “When you’re telling a TMNT story, if you’re going to bring in Splinter, you want him to have a spotlight that really lines up with who he is and the role that he has on these brothers in this wider world. If you’re gonna have Bebop and Rocksteady, if you’re gonna have Shredder, these are characters which can’t be put in as throwaway cameos. They have to be central focuses, if only because of the impact they’ve had on all people who have loved those worlds. But every single character you put in like that ends up changing what you can do in other points in the game.”
After playing through the first two chapters of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown, May 22 cannot come soon enough. The strategy genre can be pretty hit-or-miss for me, and let’s face it, not every TMNT game turns out great, but I emerged from my hours playing Tactical Takedown excited to not only further engage with the cleverly designed gameplay systems but also see where this unique story goes. Sadly, despite how surprisingly good the game plays with a controller, Strange Scaffold could not confirm if the game will ever come to consoles. Still, Nelson did tease that the studio is constantly investigating ways to bring its games to a broader audience. For now, however, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown is set to arrive on Steam on May 22.
