You can try a radical new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game on Steam right now

digitaltrends.com:

Steam Next Fest is here and you’re likely about to be up to your eyeballs in video game demos. There are plenty of promising indies you can try for free during the event, and we’ll coming at you with some recommendations as we uncover the gems. If you need a place to start, though, look no further than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown.

The Turtles’ latest adventure is unlike any they’ve embarked on before. It’s not some form of beat-em-up, but a turn-based strategy game byI Am Your Beast developer Strange Scaffold. The tactics genre may sound like an odd fit for our reptilian friends on paper, but it works surprisingly well. That’s thanks to a new spin on the genre that gives players much more to do on a single turn. It’s a fast-paced tactics game that feels spiritually linked to the Turtles’ arcade days in ways you may not see coming.

In the hour-long demo that’s now on Steam, players move through a tutorial and then four stages. Each one puts players in control of a different brother, showcasing their unique move set. It all seems par for the course early on as I move my turtle around a grid and attack ninjas, but I quickly begin to pick up what makes it different. For one, my surroundings aren’t static. As I defeat enemies over my turns, one piece of the map will disappear and a new piece will open up. I need to keep myself out of a red zone when that changeover happens or else I’ll get taken down with the map.

In that way, Tactical Takedown almost feels like a classic beat-em-up. I’m fighting a screen full of enemies and moving forward to the next battleground. That connection becomes especially apart to me when I find myself in a stage that has me moving down a street that’s not so different from a set piece you’d find in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. Of course, I can even pick up stray pizza boxes to heal myself just as I would in a beat-em-up. It’s a clever genre twist that keeps a totally new kind of