The TakeOver Reviews

A solid but hard beat'em up. I hope Matt McMuscles makes more games

A completely vanilla beat'em up, with as many Pros as it has Cons. Get on sale and play with a friend or solo on normal difficulty. On Normal: the game is fun, not too hard, a bit dull at times, but keeps the core of the game fun. On Hard: the game is frustrating, not well designed and chore that is not fun to go through unless you are a masochist. Better beat'em up include: Streets of Rage 1,2,3 & 4, TMNT: Shredder's revenge, Mother Russia Bleeds, Castle Crashers, Shank 1&2, Gauntlet(By Arrowhead). Pros: Your combos have juggle-ability like in other good fighters You actually have a ranged weapon with limited ammo Rage mode helps with frustrating fights since you cannot take damage and get a significant damage boost The music & level design slaps There are on-rails levels to give you break from the monotonous button mashing You get to pick up ammo for your ranged weapon and a machine gun in certain sections to spice up the gameplay. Cons: There are cheap bosses. When you have no ammo and low health, the spinning bayblade attack that some bosses do is too fast and tracks? With no block option you are always loosing in some way. Other games make these kinds of moves fast but not tracking or slow but tracking. This game chose both hard options and makes it a nightmare to kill these bosses without Rage or Ammo. Bosses have infinite goons. Not a problem in itself, but their respawn speed is too fast, as soon as you kill 1 of them, the moment you hit the boss with a combo you get a spawned good with a gun to shoot or break your combo, and that is if the boss doesn't already break out of your combo with an armored attack or explosion. The result is a lot of frustrating moments, when the solution you should be able to do is kill the goons, hit the boss, rinse & repeat. The melee weapons are slow and lack damage. Normally in these games, melee weapons that you pick up have low durability and do a lot of damage. Weapons here are slow, knock-down enemies, killing your combos, have no durability, but get destoyed if you drop them 2-3 times? That is confusing and unnecessary. I'm better of not using them unless are 4-5 enemies stacked together, which I can very cheaply kill by hitting all of them with the weapon over and over and over again. Some achievements straight up mislead you. The kill 100, 500 achievements do not specify that you have to complete them in 1 run. Which makes 100% completion a chore. Hard difficulty is not balanced: In harder modes in other fighting games you increase the HP and/or numbers of enemies as well as maybe their damage. The problem with this game is that someone thought it was a good idea to increase their movement speed, decision making speed of enemies as well. Resulting in you taking so much damage so fast, that picking any character with lower speed is a death sentence to your combos and life. Survival mode is badly designed: Normally in survival mode you start off easy and slowly spawn enemies of lower tiers ramping it up every few enemies killed or perhaps in waves, making each wave increase in size and enemy tiers and/or strength. Again someone decided that having the same spawning time as the boss's goons is a good idea. Resulting in slower character being swarmed and having no way to killing a single goon, before 2-3 more spawn, walk behind you by the time you finish your 1 combo and give you backshots. You need to play higher speed characters to even survive.