Takedown: Red Sabre Review - A Kickstarter failure
Tactical shooters aren’t meant to appeal to the same crowd who impatiently waits the next Call of Duty or Battlefield, games such as Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon are meant for a different audience, gamers who want realistic situations in a modern combat scenario. Rarely nowadays do military operations happen in a battlefield with snipers and infantrymen firing at each other incessantly whilst planes are carpet bombing an area and EMPs are going off every five minutes. Most operations involve a small team of people, clearing objectives with very little unnecessary damage. It’s about carefully executing the objectives and coming back in one piece. Takedown: Red Sabre seems to understand that aspect of military operations, but somewhere along the line the game went really wrong.
As soon as you start the game, you will realize that there is no campaign in Takedown, rather the single player mode is comprised of a handful of missions which you have to tackle one by one in any order you please. There is no overarching storyline or continuity, therefore you aren’t missing anything if you play them in order or not. After you’ve picked your mission, you have the opportunity to select your loadout and your entry point for the mission. This is where things have already started to go wrong and begin a theme which, you will quickly find out, recurs very often throughout the game: the lack of explanation.
You have a choice of four loadouts: Loadout 1, Loadout 2, Loadout 3 and, of course, Loadout 4. That’s all the information you are given. Your guess is as good as mine when you begin the game as to what exactly changes and which one is best for the mission you are about to tackle. The same goes for when you are given the choice of the starting area for your mission. You don’t know the advantages of starting off at a certain point, if it actually makes a difference or whether it’s just there to give you the illusion of choice. Regardless of what you pick, you will enter your first mission and have no idea what to do, where to go and how to play.
If you’ve played any FPS before, you will eventually figure out the controls without much trouble; however, it would have been nice for the game to offer a simple tutorial to explain the important aspects of the game instead of offering “training levels” which don’t exactly help much once you are off on a mission. It’s almost guaranteed that Takedown will catch you off-guard with its brutal difficulty; and not in a good way. For a game which relies on tackling missions in a tactical fashion, stealth is non-existent. One shot is usually enough to kill you, on the rare occasion you will survive getting one or two bullets in you but not more; the same also goes for your enemies.
Knowing how many shots is going to take to kill someone is very random, I once killed an enemy by shooting him in his hand which was peeking out of cover whereas other times it took several bullets to the chest. The same randomness could also be accredited to whether or not the enemy AI will work: It seems like the enemies either have superhuman senses or they completely ignore your existence. Sometimes an enemy may catch a pixel of your shadow from the corner of their eyes and before you know it, they are behind cover and shooting at you; other times the enemy may just stand there and look the wrong way. It makes no sense.
Either way, you don’t want to be taking any risks; never sprint, always peek around corners before you enter a room and make sure you check if there are any other ways an enemy can spot you. You’ll have to do this all by yourself despite having a squad following you around composed of three more agents. Somehow, your squadmates’ AI is even more random and broken than the enemies’ one: your squad will always follow you around, sure, but rarely taking cover and contributing to the success of a firefight. They might shout the occasional “tango spotted!” but it’s largely useless due to lack of visual feedback and the fact that they can somehow spot tangos through walls.
Every time I’ve heard that line, the enemy was nowhere near my line of sight and was actually present an an adjacent room. Despite having a squad following you, you don’t have any way of controlling them. Therefore entering a room is a long and dangerous process; you have to get close to the wall and lean so you can peek in and see if it’s safe. The main issue is that leaning isn’t very useful, you can lean just a few inches so in order to actually see what’s in the next room, your leg is already sticking out. The lack of a proper cover system makes just the simple act of peeking a needlessly lengthy process of trial and error as you try and guess the correct distance between you and the door.
If you haven’t been turned off after dying numerous times to the enemies who can spot you from another room and insta-kill you before you have time to react (whilst none of the others seem even a little alarmed by the fact that there is a gunfight going on inside the building, just a few rooms away from them) you will run into another problem: completing objectives. You can see the objectives before you start a mission and you can check them anytime when pausing the game. The main problem is that, in order to remain realistic, you don’t have any indication on your HUD as to where these objectives are. You also aren’t given a map to check, or written instructions as to where you can find these objectives or what the hell they even look like. It’s not uncommon that, after you killed all the enemies in an area, you just run around for a few minutes and check every object in the room to see if you can interact with it and complete your objective.
The only mission I was able to complete was the first one which required me to disarm three bombs, hack a server and go to the roof for extraction. After having failed the mission countless times, I found that the most effective way was to clear the whole level of enemies and then go on a treasure hunt to find all the objectives. There was nothing tactical about it. I memorized where the majority of guards stood, I exploited my use of cover and peeking so that I could shoot the enemies in some extremity which was sticking out whilst they were in cover, and then took my time and ran around the whole place looking for the bombs and server. After that I calmly walked up the stairs and to the roof where a helicopter was hovering in the air and the mission ended.
Takedown: Red Sabre is buggy, gives the player too little information to help them understand what the hell is going on and has some of the worst AI in recent memory; by far the biggest offense, though, is how it wants to be a tactical shooter and completely fails at being one. Other games like the previously mentioned Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon can be just as challenging as Takedown: Red Sabre when it comes to firefights, but at least those games actually give you control over a squad to help you be more stealthy, enemies don’t have super senses and you get rewarded for being silent and stealthy. On top of that, you usually have some form of gadgets or tools to help you.
In Takedown you have nothing but the soldier you control and a gimmicky peeking system. Most missions end up being a firefight for the first few minutes in which you have to hope no bullet hits you, followed by trying to figure out where your objectives are hoping you don’t turn a corner too fast where an enemy is patiently waiting for you to pass by. It’s the furthest thing from tactical combat there is.