Takedown: Red Sabre Review

The most insulting part is that your teammates aren't even the worst AI in the game. That grand prize goes to your foes, who are the first-person shooter equivalent of a group of deaf-blind concussion victims sliding around an ice rink. They can't navigate, they rarely take cover, they have zero interest in their self-preservation, they sometimes completely fail to notice gunshots happening nearby – even in the same room as them – and they have this bizarre system of movement where they occasionally forget how to strafe. The most sophisticated behaviour they have is sprinting madly around like a decapitated chicken driving a forklift if you deal enough damage to them. By moving quickly enough between cover you can actually force them to ignore you altogether, at which point the game turns into Splinter Cell for imbeciles. The worst kind of AI is not only foolish but also unreliable, so in those proud traditions they will of course snap around and kill you from across the map every now and then, just to remind you not to get too comfortable. It’s enough to make you bemoan the lack of a spectator function, really, because I have a sneaking suspicion that watching the two computer-controlled teams duking it out would be a hysterically good spectator sport. You could even place bets on which AI will get stuck in an infinite behaviour loop first.

Strangely enough, I became quite appreciative of Takedown's visuals, even if they do look like they belong in the distant yesteryear of 2007. Environments are colourful, clean and smoothly lit, lending a kind of clarity that's as conducive to gameplay as it is easy on the eyes. There's no faffing about wondering if a distant brown smudge on a brown smudgy background is an insurgent with an agenda or not, so everything you see can be dealt with the moment you spot it. Characters sit on that particular ladder rung just a few steps below the attempted photorealism of modern military shooters, and as a result you might not be able to watch the beads of sweat glistening on a terrorist's brow through your high-powered sniper scope, but at least everybody won't look hideously dated about three years from now when we all realise how deep in the uncanny valley they really were. It all feels very sensible and controlled, a refreshing example of graphics serving the game rather than the art designer's personal fantasy. I can almost picture the poor chap who worked on the visual design looking around with an expression of dismay as he realised how much effort he'd wasted on it.

At this point it scarcely seems like a meaningful comment to describe the game's bugs. Everything leading up to this point has indicated a release that was rushed out of the door several months before it was ready, so such a factor would be practically implicit. Still, it's amazing to find the number of bugs that make Takedown outright broken rather than merely being annoying: assuming you can even get past the drunken server browser, the game has this nasty habit of disconnecting you from the server at random, even in single player mode, and when closed will continue to run in the background without fail, presumably in order to chew up memory and send pictures of you to Serellan while you're in the middle of compromising activities. Riding on top of this tidal wave is a frothy topping of smaller but no less frustrating issues, like the way loadouts are occasionally reset for no particular reason, or the way the netcode decides every now and then to send all your packets to Uzbekistan, or the spawn locations not having any logical connection to the image that represents them, or the astoundingly awkward interface with zero graphical options, clearly designed from the ground up for a console audience that was probably never going to exist and now certainly won't. Some design decisions are just downright ridiculous, including mandatory text-to-speech for all player conversations – unless you fancy looking for help online and messing with the game’s configuration files - and the total absence of a scoreboard.

People who sympathise with the game's plight might show up and say things like “what d'you expect, it's a Kickstarter game”, but that's not an excuse to barter with. If you, as a developer, don't have anywhere near the necessary resources to realise your vision, then you don't give it the half-arsed treatment and shift the blame onto what you'd worked with, because the consumer will only perceive the abhorrent final product and have little sympathy for you after your acquisition of their money. Bedroom programmers do not set out to create a MMORPG in their spare time.

At the end of this train wreck, the kindest thing you can say about Takedown is that it's an ambitious title that severely overestimated its budget, or its deadline, or possibly both. It's painful to watch, really, because the game does try to a certain extent to be something that isn’t run-of-the-mill. There's the framework for a good game here, and even the necessary vision, but a framework is all it is, with the few strips of meaty content hanging off its skeleton slowly rotting in their own filth. The fundamental controls and mechanics are fine and a couple of the maps from its scant selection are even quite nice, but the shameful lack of depth leaves an experience that's more empty and stale as a discarded milk carton. One day, perhaps after years of patches and updates, it could be a great game, but as it stands, Takedown is pathetically undernourished, laced with bugs to the point of unplayability and completely overshadowed by every other tactical shooter made since the invention of polygons.

And I didn’t even see a Red Sabre.