The Takeover is a brawler produced by Youtuber Matt McMuscles, formerly of Super Best Friends Play. I bought the game because of his regular shilling of it and because it was on sale on Switch. After playing it I have to say that it’s a pretty impressive project for a game done primarily by one person (who goes by the handle Pelikan13.) It is not, however, without its limitations.
The Takeover is unapologetically an homage to late 80s and 90s brawlers like Streets of Rage and Final Fight. The game is composed of 3D-rendered assets but plays mostly like a traditional belt scroller. You can walk left, right, up and down on the field of play, as well as jump, dash, and roll. The story is very basic, with you playing one of three characters (a cop, his girlfriend, and his best friend who is also a cop) out to save a young girl from the clutches of a consortium of gangs who are trying to take over the city. It’s a bit of a muddled mess conceptually (the game is called ‘the Takeover’ but most of the plot revolves around rescuing the girl, not stopping the takeover of the city) and the execution isn’t great. Cut scenes are done comic book style with frankly amateurish illustrations, and while there’s voice acting none of the writing is compelling and a lot of the voice acting is kind of bad. This is an indie game done on a shoestring budget so I’m willing to cut it a break on its production values, and it’s not like the games it’s riffing on had great stories, but frankly I would have cut or at least curtailed the story significantly because it adds nothing to the experience. I would also note that the premise of some cops using their fists to beat up a bunch of gang members does not play well in 2021, even if it’s one of those ridiculous multi-ethnic gangs featuring everything from a Thai kickboxer to a white teen girl in a bikini called “Half-pint” who carries a spiked baseball bat. This stuff is straight out of the game’s influences so it’s not a huge deal, but it could have done something more creative or interesting if it was going to feature as much story as it does. There’s also some sexism in the form of almost all the women wearing very revealing clothes (including the playable Megan) though again that’s straight out of the influences and not a huge deal. I guess I just don’t feel like ‘homage’ is a great reason to retread the sins of games past when indie projects have a chance to do more interesting things. It’s both a little bit offensive and very played out.
Fortunately the game proper looks much better than its cut scenes, and has some really great music including from the legendary Yuzo Koshiro himself. The graphics are stylized with thick black outlines that give the game a pseudo-illustrated look and they are shockingly detailed for a game with a tiny team. I believe but am not certain that all the characters are pre-rendered sprites based on stylized 3D assets with thick outlines, and a few actual 3D assets thrown in, but however this thing is built technically it looks great. If Capcom released a new Final Fight game that looked like this I would consider it completely acceptable, so it’s very impressive for essentially a one man team.
The game also plays pretty well. You have a slightly enhanced move set from those classic games with punch, kick, jump, special move that drains your life, run, and a gun you can pull out at any time (though with limited ammo) all consistently available. You can also grab enemies by walking into them because this wouldn’t be a Streets of Final Fight game if you couldn’t. There are some additional mechanics including both a screen clearing super move (distinct from the special move that drains life) and a “rage” mode that slows time and gives you enhanced speed and defense, each of which is charged by beating up baddies without taking hits. You can break crates and other environmental objects to find goodies including lots of points items but also health, 1Ups, and weapons including crowbars, katanas, and machine guns, which are used the same way they are in every game like this. One small complaint I had was that you can’t melee when you have the machine gun, but I think that was done for balance, so you couldn’t just save it for the bosses.
Speaking of bosses, there are seven stages broken up into three substages each, with the third substage being a boss fight. Bosses are a little more balanced than they generally are in games like this, mostly acting like normal enemies with longer range and harder hits, and their biggest ability being to interrupt your combos by charging up their own special move that unleashes an AOE attack that knocks you back and damages you. They have lots of health so they’re not push overs, but the main strategy for most of them is just to approach them from a diagonal so you’re off their attack vectors and then combo them until they start charging their special at which point you roll away. I will say that the final boss is especially cheap and frustrating, but I think that was an homage choice rather than a design failure. It’s not an enjoyable fight, but beat em up final bosses almost never are. These are flaws that I’m willing to overlook on the grounds that this is a tiny indie game and making good, unique, bosses takes a lot of work.
The base combat itself is very satisfying. It’s much faster and more fluid than most games of this style, allowing you to chain together punches and kicks into furious combos, and do things like juggle enemies and throw them into one another. Walking from left to right beating fools up is a pretty good time, and the fact that the game nails the gameplay and in-game presentation so well means it does 90% of what it has to in order to be a good game. Enemy variety is so-so. The game keeps introducing new enemies as you get deeper, but aside from some ranged foes they don’t really feel that different to fight from one another. Sure one guy might have a knife that he slashes with and another might be able to block your attacks so you have to grapple him, but they all just kind of walk forward towards you and you deal with them in mostly the same way. Again, more complicated AI patterns are something that a larger team might have been able to handle, but it’s not like brawlers are known for their brilliant and adaptive AI foes.
The game does try to introduce some variety in a few ways. Some enemies (or environmental crates) drop explosives when defeated or destroyed, meaning that you often have to move to get out of the way of them and can also lure baddies into their radius. There are the aforementioned weapons, which the bad guys don’t pick up but you can use for a while until you take a few hits and they vanish (or the machine gun runs out of ammo.) Stages have environmental hazards, like acid droplets or lightning strikes, which you have to avoid, though they are thankfully telegraphed enough that it’s very doable. Occasionally a bunch of barrels come rolling at you and you have to jump over them. This is never explained, but it’s another example of homage, and at least it’s a change of pace. There’s also a driving substage where you are driving into the screen and have to shoot enemy vans and avoid civilian cars and obstacles. This plays like an arcade game that’s designed purely to suck your quarters and suffers from twitchy controls and poor visibility, where it’s way too easy to destroy an enemy, granting you a time bonus, only to smash directly into the civilian car you couldn’t see that was right in front of him, losing time. It’s not unfun and you continue to the next stage even if you fail to reach the end, so it serves its purpose of providing another change of pace and gives you a chance at a 1UP. There’s a substage that’s modeled on Afterburner that’s kind of boring and easy and frankly should have been cut, but is short and inoffensive. There’s also a sublevel where you get an unlimited machine gun and the game plays a little bit like Narc. It’s…fine, though it probably goes on a bit too long.
The game has unlimited continues and a robust stage select screen that lets you pick any of the sub stages once you have reached them and unlocked them, so it isn’t punishing. It also has a challenge mode and survival mode for some increased replay value if that’s your thing. You get three characters to play as with a fourth being unlockable, a local high score board, a decent suite of options and, of course, local co-op. It’s a fully featured software product and I think that the decisions they made here were all pretty good except that you have to quit out of the game to access the options or digital manual, and considering how many systems it has it seems like making those things accessible mid game would have been good. Another compromise due to budget and team size.
I enjoyed playing through The Takeover but my main issues with it are inherent to the brawler genre and to a game with a budget this small. The presentation in the cut scenes is not good, and there are some performance issues on the Switch, though nothing gamebreaking. A couple frame rate hitches and some very minor visual glitches like a Katana that floats above your character’s shoulder while he takes an elevator. The loading times are also a bit gnarly. Not awful but long enough that you’ll notice them. More importantly, the game just gets a little boring as you fight the same foes across 7 longish stages and while there are a few new enemies introduced and some attempts to switch things up, it’s not enough to keep it from getting a bit repetitive. The bosses can be a little frustrating, especially because they all seem to have unlimited adds who respawn immediately when you kill them, meaning that they’re more of a nuisance than something to actually engage with.
It’s a fun game to play through once but I don’t see myself coming back to it. There’s a reason that the brawler genre died in the 90s, and it’s that these games were perfect arcade experiences. They thrived on flashy graphics and novelty. They also saw success on 8 and 16 bit systems, against competition that was shorter and simpler than modern games. They were perfect rentals; a game you would bring home from the video store, play over a weekend, and then return, maybe buying a copy of one or two favorites just to have something mindless to play from time to time. The Takeover is also a perfect rental game, worth playing through once and maybe messing with occasionally or if you love the genre and have someone local to co-op with. Of course you can’t rent digital games a la carte anymore, which makes this an ideal discount pick up. I got it on Switch for $7 plus tax, and it’s $5 on Steam right now. At those prices it’s a decent pick up. You’ll get maybe 2-3 hours out of a playthrough and a bit more if you mess with the other modes or clear it with another character or a friend (though it’s a bit long for a quick co-op playthrough while waiting for a pizza to arrive or whatever.) You may return to it or may not, but for less than $10 it brings enough nostalgia and satisfying punching and kicking to be worth it. At a full $20 I would say it’s not worth it. There’s just too much competition these days. So how did Matt McMuscles do in his first producer job? Pretty well, I’d say. The game accomplishes what it sets out to do and it’s fun while it lasts. I can’t help but compare it to @imunbeatable80's review of the apparently quite bad 99 Vidas and say that this less ambitious, more focused, experience makes it the superior Youtuber game. I had $7 worth of fun with this game. Your mileage may vary.
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