Decent beat em up that just makes it into recommended territory for me. Four character and a large enough moveset to keep things interesting but nothing pushes it much further than being average.

Good basic combos to string together with the punch and kick button, alternating between them can extend the combo and both types of attacks have their own combo finishers with the punch combo being able to end knocking the enemy down or up if you hold that direction. You can do two special attack that drains your health with the push of a button with one activating while stationary and the other while moving, you can unleash a high damage area clearing attack when a special meter fills, activate a rage mode where you ignore damage, do more damage, and are harder to stun, can grab and then continue to hit or throw enemies from the front or behind, a dodge up or down can be performed by hitting up or down twice while hitting left or right twice or holding a button allows you to run. In a more unique feature there is a button to draw and fire a gun that can keep enemies back or destroy hazards. Each of the four characters has their own strengths, moves, and each uses a different type of gun.

Somewhat overly long with no saves but does have a stage select, a bit too much focus on a poor story that really lacks humor or excitement. There are some different types of stages thrown in for variety like driving while shooting at enemy cars with a gatling gun and shooting down enemy jets and helicopter while in a jet of your own dodging missiles. These two different stages aren't interesting enough to want more of them but it does briefly change things up. Dull melee weapons, I don't understand why this is such a problem with beat em up games, you can get a crowbar or katana and both are swung like a club that knocks the enemy down where you can then just stand over them to repeat the attack over and over again. With the rage meter, special meter, and ability to just walk around with the katana or crowbar when you find one until you drop it three times the game is very easy and I only lost lives in the last stage when you fight some high damage dealing robot enemies, fight all the bosses again, then fight the end boss.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1678992381407014912

The TakeOver has some interesting ideas that makes it standout among the other beat-em up games in the genre. Though it does have its issues.

I never expect much of a story on these type of games, but I do appreciate when the game tries to put more effort into it. The game starts of with a decently length prologue and has cutscenes at the end of each stage. This makes the stage transitions flow better and easier to understand how the story actually progresses. With that said, the story itself isn't all that interesting, but I do appreciate the effort.

The characters are one-note, but like the story, I did appreciate the effort put in them to showcase who they are during cutscenes. A nice feature is that all 3 characters appear in the cutscenes and have dialogue together even if you regardless of who you pick.

The graphics appear nice at a glance. The textures are shiny and the backgrounds have pretty good details. The animation does feel lacking on the other hand. The animation of when characters drop to the ground and get back up look awkward and unpolish.

I have mixed opinions on the character artworks as well. The ones used in the game's cover and title screen look great, but the designs used during the comic book style cutscenes are noticeably different and not to my taste.

The music is a surprising highlight for the game that goes well with the combat.

As for the combat, it's solid overall and has a good emphasis on multi-hit combos. One unique feature are the use of guns. Every character has a revolver that they can pick up ammo for and shoot anytime. It's not as good as I'd liked since it's slow and doesn't do much damage.

Enemies have a decent amount of variety, but there's an annoying emphasis on guns and explosives. The further you progress, the more enemies with guns start to appear. This can make the battlefield pretty annoying to deal with along with the incredibly annoying sentry robots with machine guns. These just make the final stage incredibly difficult compared to everything else.

Overall, The TakeOver is a decent beat-em up game with an above average focus on story. The length isn't that long, but it's decent overall since it took me about almost 3 hours to beat. About 30 minutes of it is spent repeating the final stage however.