Leonardo leads.
Donatello does machines.Raphael is cool but crude.
Michelangelo is a party dude.
Anyone (over forty) knows this to be true. Though “doing” machines is not something one ought to interrogate too closely. Anyway, I, like everyone I knew at school, loved the Turtles (NB. ‘Ninja’ in America, ‘Hero’ in soft-shelled Britain). And this game from Strange Scaffold promises to bring back the radicalness of the teen greens and blend it with turn-based tactics.
I am a great fan of the XCOM and Rabbids games, and as a starting point, TMNT:TT (as I’ll snappily refer to it) can be summed up as just that, a mix of those two. It’s not as detailed as XCOM, and it isn’t as silly and fun as Rabbids, but it manages to succeed on its own terms.
The game takes place in a world where Splinter and Shredder are both dead, and the Turtles have to battle a new enemy who leads a familiar army of disposable henchmen, the Foot Clan. There is some plot and dialogue around loss and growing up, but it’s limited to some short text exchanges between levels.
The music is perfectly pitched for the game. It reminds me of the Streets of Rage series (a good thing) and the artist(s) have made it sound like it’s being played from an 80s console.
And this ties into the next topic, the graphics. I really loved the retro look of this game. Each battle takes place on an isometric grid. The characters are essentially board game figurines and they, and the backgrounds look like a real comicbook brought to life in 3D cell-shaded glory. There is some animation, but that’s quite limited and you will spend much of your time staring at the static pieces working out your next moves.
And yes, moves, plural, is the key. Because what I liked about this game and I felt differentiated it from games like XCOM, was a sense of pace and urgency. There is no time limit, but you’re incentivised to keep moving as each turn a new piece of the map opens up while a section behind you falls away.
The music is perfectly pitched for the game. It reminds me of the Streets of Rage series (a good thing) and the artist(s) have made it sound like it’s being played from an 80s console.
And this ties into the next topic, the graphics. I really loved the retro look of this game. Each battle takes place on an isometric grid. The characters are essentially board game figurines and they, and the backgrounds look like a real comicbook brought to life in 3D cell-shaded glory. There is some animation, but that’s quite limited and you will spend much of your time staring at the static pieces working out your next moves.
And yes, moves, plural, is the key. Because what I liked about this game and I felt differentiated it from games like XCOM, was a sense of pace and urgency. There is no time limit, but you’re incentivised to keep moving as each turn a new piece of the map opens up while a section behind you falls away.
This allows for battles on moving subway trains to feel dynamic, despite the fact that you can actually take as much time as you want over moves. And this is further enhanced by the fact that bad guys are generally weak but numerous, and the turtles prevail by taking out chains of henchmen (and women? They’re all hooded, so who knows?).
One slightly strange aspect is that each level only involves one of the turtley awesome posse. They all have different styles (Donatello uses traps, Leonardo can take on multiple enemies and Michaelangelo has increased movement for example) which adds another layer of interest and longevity to proceedings. I would have liked to have seen a group effort in later levels, but that would perhaps make it too complicated (though perhaps something for DLC?)
The combat works smoothly and I found I whizzed through the game pretty speedily. And therein we hit the only real complaint I have with the game. I found my first run through a little easy. You have three lives for each mission and I only ever lost one in any of them. Each mission is quite short, and you drop straight back in when you die, so you tend to not need to much more to get through to the end of the stage.
The second half of this gripe is that, once you’ve completed the game, you can play it in a harder ‘remix’ mode. This is a LOT harder. I struggled with this setting and finding the lives are depleting at a rate of knots. So, it’d be nice to perhaps have a steady difficulty curve in the main mode rather than what felt like just easy and hard modes.
The combat works smoothly and I found I whizzed through the game pretty speedily. And therein we hit the only real complaint I have with the game. I found my first run through a little easy. You have three lives for each mission and I only ever lost one in any of them. Each mission is quite short, and you drop straight back in when you die, so you tend to not need to much more to get through to the end of the stage.
The second half of this gripe is that, once you’ve completed the game, you can play it in a harder ‘remix’ mode. This is a LOT harder. I struggled with this setting and finding the lives are depleting at a rate of knots. So, it’d be nice to perhaps have a steady difficulty curve in the main mode rather than what felt like just easy and hard modes.
But this gripe aside, I REALLY enjoyed this game. It looks and sounds fantastic. The combat is well-balanced (though possibly not taxing enough) I didn’t want to stop playing once I’d started (it has a ‘one more level’ appeal). 
SUMMARY
It made me feel like I was playing out a comic book adventure, becoming the fifth turtle, and reliving my TMNT dreams of the late 1980s. 💙🐢
8/10
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