Thursday, September 11, 2014

Takedown: Red Sabre - 2/20 hours

As predicted, Takedown: Red Sabre is chewing me up and spitting me out. I'm finding it less a "thinking person's shooter" and more of a "masochist with lightning reflexes' shooter." There doesn't seem to be a great connection between my actions and decisions and the outcome of my mission. Generally, taking it slow seems to have some benefit, except when  the enemy one-shots me from across the room, or when my crosshairs are right on its torso, but my bullets seem to have no effect. And carefully searching room-by-room is completely unpredictable in its efficacy. Sometimes, the enemy kills me quicker than my natural reaction time (seriously, makers of Takedown: Red Sabre - there is a measurable delay between when a human being sees something and when they are able to react to it - if your enemies can kill me in less than 250 milliseconds, there is basically no point in my playing the game).

Other times, the enemies will miss me with their weapons, or hit and fail to kill me, so I'm guessing that the intent is to model the unpredictable deadliness of a real gun fight. Anyone could be killed at any time, and it's not always fair. I suppose I get it. Yet, that is one of the many reasons I am not an amoral mercenary in real life.

Speaking of which, I'm not sure who this "Red Sabre" organization is, but I'm pretty sure that, were this an action movie, they'd be the villains. The first mission I played told me that I had to stop some terrorists because "exposure of Neogen's bioweapons research would harm its image." Um . . . good?

So, there is one advantage to being terrible at this game - by leading so many of Red Sabre's elite force of enforcers-for-hire to their untimely deaths, you could say that I, the player, am actually the biggest hero of all.

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