Game #1129: The Takeover

  Meet Axel's stunt double.

 While I love beat'em ups, the first thing I thought when I saw The Takeover was... this game is ugly. It's no secret I hate digitized sprites, so this game looking like a cheap Killer Instinct didn't help. Thankfully, I decided to give it a try and found a more than competent beat'em up.

 Plot is pretty by the numbers, person with relationship to main character is kidnapped, main character rounds up the boys, and they go on a punching spree through a crime-ridden city. At first you can play as any of three characters, and upon beating the game you unlock a mysterious fourth character that isn't mentioned or appears anywhere else in the game. You can also unlock relay mode that lets you change characters by jumping twice. Besides the lengthy, for the genre, 2 hour story mode you also have Survival, Practice and an unlockable challenge mode, featuring stages from the story mode but under challenges such as not using super attacks.

 The gameplay is pretty simple: Characters have two attack buttons, Punch and Kick, that you can mix to perform combos. Punch attacks offer more variations since if you hold down Up or Down it'll produce a different attack. There are two special moves per character that consume a bit of health, a Gun that you can use at any moment provided you have bullets and then there are the two other mechanics: Supers and Rage. By defeating enemies and not getting hit you fill your super gauge, once full it's your forever until you press Punch+Kick. More times than I could count I accidentally pulled a super move when doing combos, but it might've been might fault. As for Rage, it simply builds up as you hit enemies, and once full you can press L to become invulnerable and stronger for a short while.

 My one beef with the combat mechanics is that losing health on your special moves meant that I opted to never use them. Streets of Rage 3 did it best, I think, by letting you charge a freebie over time, but Streets of Rage 4 also did something interesting with recoverable health when using them. In comparison this feels like a tool I don't ever want to use. That's my one complaint, as you can juggle enemies in the air with your attacks, thus performing simple combos. The physics and audio-visual feedback feels just right, so I had fun beating up enemies.

 Besides not finding the art direction appealing, I also felt like loading times were a bit too lengthy, at least on the Switch.

 The Takeover is another great addition to this new generation of indie and pseudo-indie beat'em up games like Streets of Rage 4 and River City Girls. You can also clearly tell that this was a passion project, the developers wanted to make a tribute to 90's beat'em ups, something I feel they accomplished quite well. Now, then, for their next game I'd like them to move away from these ugly digitized sprites and either make simple 3-D models or proper pixel sprites. And if they don't... I'll still play it, because a good game is a good game.

7.5