While the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lend themselves well to arcade brawlers, developers have started to get a little more experimental with the heroes in a half-shell. Strange Scaffold is one such a developer, and the team just announced a new game called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown. For the first time in the history of the franchise, Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo will appear in a turn-based game, and the presentation looks like figurines on dioramas. This time around, the TMNT find themselves divided up, with different campaigns for each hero, and a total of 20 levels spread between them.
Videos by ComicBook.com
On top of the unique approach, players can also expect a story unlike anything we’ve seen in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game. When Tactical Takedown begins, Splinter and Shredder are both dead. We don’t know how the two leaders met their fates, but the TMNT are a little bit older this time, and they’ve started to grow apart following their leader’s death. Though their primary antagonist is no longer among the living, the Foot Clan lives on. The game’s description only notes that a new leader has stepped up, but the key art seems to suggest that Karai might have taken control. A short trailer for the game can be found below, offering a glimpse at how the combat will play out.
Strange Scaffold is the development team behind games like El Paso, Elsewhere, I Am Your Beast, and Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator. The Steam user reviews for those games all range from “Very Positive” to “Overwhelmingly Positive,” so it seems like the TMNT franchise is in pretty good hands with Tactical Takedown. Music in the game will be composed by RJ Lake, who has referred to himself as “the main composer” for Strange Scaffold. The trailer above gives us an idea of what to expect from his music in Tactical Takedown, and the game’s Steam page says that we can expect a “multi-genre soundtrack.”
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As of this writing, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown has only been announced for Steam. That’s bound to disappoint fans hoping to see a console release, and the comments section for the trailer on YouTube contains a number of fans requesting that the game make the jump to Switch and mobile. For now, we’ll have to wait and see what happens, but it’s hard to imagine that this one won’t get a release on other platforms at some point. The TMNT have a long history on consoles, and if there’s a lot of interest, we can probably expect an announcement sometime in the near future. As far as Steam is concerned, no release date or price point has been announced.
What do you think of the first trailer for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown? Are you happy to see the TMNT expanding to genres beyond arcade brawlers? Share your thoughts with me directly on Twitter at @Marcdachamp, on Bluesky at @Marcdachamp, or on Instagram at @Dachampgaming!