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I Kickstarted a game and I don’t like it

I helped to Kickstart Takedown: Red Sabre last year, a tactical first person shooter that was meant to breathe life back into the tactical first person shooter genre. The man behind it, Christian Allen from Serellan LLC, said as much in his Kickstarter pitch, and I believed him. I plunked down my $15 (around R150), and left him to get it done.

His goal was a modest $200,000, which was exceeded by around $38,000 by the time the Kickstarter closed. All told, that wasn’t exactly a lot of money to make a game considering the salaries of designers/programmers/artists/sound people, which can be as high as $84,000 per year per person and the fact that games rarely take less than a year to develop. Nevertheless, that’s the cash Christian and Serellan had to work with, and the assumption made by me and other backers was that the promises made were cognisant of that fact. Check out the game’s Kickstarter page to see the initial pitch, and all the updates that were posted since the funding campaign wrapped up last year.

GRAW2: Not shit.
GRAW2: Not shit.

Christian Allen had pretty good credentials, too, as he had worked on several Ghost Recon titles, including a stint as the lead designer of Ghost Recon 2 and both GR: Advanced Warfighter games. I personally enjoyed those games due to their tactical depth as well as their polished presentation, so based on this I was convinced that if anyone could kickstart the resurgence of the tactical first-person shooter, it would be Mr. Allen.

Just-about-entirely-useless AI.
Just-about-entirely-useless AI.

The product that was actually delivered when the game went live on the 20th of September 2013 fell far short of my expectations; not because I am an unreasonable git, but because the game itself was almost completely devoid of tactical options. I could not order any of the men in my four-man squad to do anything (a cornerstone of tactical gameplay in my opinion), it had no map with which to plan my squad’s assault or even see the layout before going in, and the only nod to “tactical” gameplay that I saw was my character’s slow walking speed, much like the way soldiers in Rainbow Six moved, the game that pretty much started the tactical shooter genre back in the day.

Even worse was the enemy AI, which proved to be anything from super-human to mentally-challenged. Sometimes they missed completely at short range and others they nailed my guys with headshots from unlikely positions, or without appearing to raise their weapons. And then there’s their ability to soak up bullets, taking anywhere from three shots and up to go down. That wasn’t exactly a realistic effect considering the firepower being toted by my squad.

Gun show.
Gun show.

That’s actually one thing Serellan got right, in my opinion: the guns look and feel appropriately chunky, I just wish they were as powerful as they look and sound, and that there were more to choose from. I also wish the loadout menus where you choose your equipment were designed with speed and ease of use in mind. As they appear in-game now, those two things do not apply.

The levels themselves were actually quite attractive, although the fact that most doors were open and there was very little interactivity to be found proved rather disappointing. I had expected to be able to breach doors regularly, or poke high-tech cameras through the gaps beneath them for some sort of tactical advantage, but no luck. There were a handful of doors to be breached, but the execution was severely lacking resulting in breaches that felt more like scripted events than something that could be employed dynamically, and I saw no door-cameras or high-tech gadgets available for use.

Oh look another open door
Oh look, I can *close* doors, but what good is that ,exactly?

Serellan has released several patches since the game launched, but they are mostly fixes for the connectivity issues experienced by players trying to find and join multiplayer servers. I didn’t try that, so I can’t comment from my own experience, however there are numerous forum posts detailing the difficulties a lot of people have had with it.

The developers remain committed to the game, with additional patches promised which gives me hope that in a few weeks (or months) Takedown: Red Sabre will be a lot more playable than it is now. Hopefully that means some genuine tactical options in the future, the ability to give orders and smarter enemy AI, as that’s a game I look forward to playing.

For now, however, I feel the same disappointment I am sure a lot of game publishers have felt over the years at final products that simply don’t meet the quality standards promised by the developers at the outset. I honestly can’t help but think “THIS is what you did with the money I gave you?”, or wonder why, exactly, Serellan opted to release the game in this buggy, unpolished form.

A major part of the Kickstarter model’s appeal is that developers aren’t forced to release their games early by publishers anxious to recoup their investment, so why this happened is a puzzle. Unfortunately it has also left a bad taste in my mouth, and I will be very wary of Kickstarting more games on top of the 11 I’ve already given money to. I just hope the remaining 9 I’ve backed that haven’t been released yet work out differently (the new Leisure Suit Larry remake wasn’t as good as I had hoped, either).

For now, if you have a hankering to play a proper tactical shooter, complete with planning and reasonably decent AI as well as competent multiplayer support, consider Rainbox Six 3 instead, which can be had for $9.99 on Steam – it’s a lot better than Takedown: Red Sabre in its current state.

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