Interesting looking tactical shooter- Takedown

E3 2013 - Takedown: Red Sabre Co-Op Hands on Impressions and Video Interview
Time to take of the training wheels.
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6:00 AM on 6/18/2013 by Nick Puleo

I'm an old school PC gamer at heart. I remember some of the best years of PC gaming, especially around the time I went to college. We had titles like Half-Life, Diablo and Rainbow Six hitting their peak then and some of my best memories are playing those games in co-op or multiplayer. While the Rainbow Six franchise has mostly lived on, it's undergone several changes along the way - what we have now is a bit softer. Enter Takedown: Red Sabre - a big boy (or girl) tactical shooter.
We went hands on with the  game at E3 2013 and talked with Chris Allen, the game's Creative Director. As I sat down to play Takedown with a handful of other devs in co-op, I immediately noticed how much slower my character moves. As I pushed forward into what looked like a high end luxury apartment my teammates quickly called out covering vectors for me. It wasn't  long before I remembered to hug the walls, peak around corners, and call out enemies.
As we progressed the enemies weren't lit up wearing red vests, or they didn't come charging out at us like some terrorist with a death wish. Instead they remained in cover, volleyed bullets at us, and didn't yell out their own positions as they tried to maneuver. Taking down an enemy requires only one well placed bullet, but knowing the enemy is down requires visual confirmation. Perhaps you only wounded him? There's no floating score indicator here.

Takedown: Red Sabre is built on the Unreal Engine 3 and graphically it's decent enough. The game's six areas are broken up into 18 distinct playable maps for scenarios, co-op, and adversarial play. While there's on over arching story in Takedown, each scenario does have a specific objective and goal. These maps support six player co-op and you can also play terrorist hunt on any of the maps if you want to play random clear missions with your co-op buddies.
I forgot just how brutally difficult a true tactical shooter can be. Random enemy positions in the map we played caused our team to drop rather quickly numerous times - there's no learning the level to "cheat" your way through. For purists the game has a minimal HUD so there's nothing getting in your line of sight. One unique little feature I found was as you approached a wall, depending on the length of your weapon, your character would need to pull that gun up to his body so he could close in for cover. This means snipers won't be able to easily run around without having their weapon pulled away from aiming.
Allen told us that the weapons themselves are modeled to behave like their real life counterparts - they didn't try to balance the weapons against each other. Like we've said, this is a serious shooter for serious tactical enthusiasts.
Takedown: Red Sabre is set to be released on Steam and Xbox Live arcade later this year. In the meantime we suggest you go play some SWAT 4 as practice in the meantime.

Takedown: Red Sabre bringing tactical shooting back to Steam and XBLA
by Mike Suszek  on Jun 22nd 2013 4:30PM

Indie developer Serellan billed its first-person shooter Takedown: Red Sabre as a "spiritual successor to the original Rainbow Six and SWAT 4" when the developer successfully raised $221,833 on Kickstarter in April 2012. Squad-based tactical shooters, where real-life military tactics take priority over the run-and-gun trappings of triple-A shooters, are arguably harder to come by and have become a niche in the broad FPS genre.

Crowdfunding Takedown made more sense to creative director Christian Allen then, who told Joystiq at E3 that "part of [the decision to crowdfund] was figuring out what people really care about and what people really wanted." The project's 5,423 backers saw promise in the game, due in no small part to the team's history; Allen is a former creative director on the Ghost Recon series and was design lead for Halo: Reach. Perhaps equally reassuring for tactical shooter fans is the fact that Allen spent about nine and a half years serving in three different United States military branches: Four years as law enforcement in the Marines and over five with the Air Force and Army.

Takedown: Red Sabre features single-player, six-player co-operative and 12-player competitive multiplayer modes. Like tactical first-person shooters of the past, sprinting through the non-linear maps isn't a viable strategy, as the game places an emphasis on slow, strategic and realistic warfare. Part of that realism comes from the work put into the game's weapons: Allen said that creating just one gun for the game takes about three weeks of development time for the Seattle-based team of about 10 developers.

Funding Takedown via Kickstarter wasn't the developer's only means of making the game a reality. "Early on we had some angel investor interest, and that was our original direction," Allen said. "When I did the Kickstarter, I had these [venture capital] angel guys, and they were interested, and they bailed on us at a certain point." Allen said the developer also had "a lot of pressure to go free-to-play" from unnamed publishers located in China. In February of this year, Serellan found a publishing partner in 505 Games, 10 months after its Kickstarter project closed.

The developer is planning an early release for Kickstarter backers, who were assured that just because the game now has publisher support doesn't mean it will stray from being the niche tactical shooter that fans are hoping for. "You're not going to make money by coming in as a partner and then making a Call of Duty clone," Allen said, referring to one fan's wonderment over the possibility of a major publisher such as Activision picking up Takedown early on in the project's life. "Because then we're just going to fall on our face like all the other Call of Duty clones."

Allen added that a tactical shooter such as Takedown has "a window and a market" to which it's best suited, and that by budgeting appropriately and aiming for that market, it can be successful. To him, that means focusing first on PC and ensuring that "console games are solid based on the technology that you have," which is not unlike past tactical FPS games that first launched on PC.

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean the game is guaranteed to be received well by larger audiences. "We are going to get slaughtered on Metacritic," Allen said. "There's going to be a billion game sites out there, they get the game, they have no idea what it is, they get killed, and they're going to go, 'well, 60.'" Even so, Serellan already has thousands of players to fall back on thanks to its crowdfunding campaign when Takedown: Red Sabre comes to Steam and XBLA this fall.