Avonaeon

I'm writing this a few days after release, and this game is extremely buggy. The devs are apparently aware and working a patch, but it doesn't change the fact that this game, bugs aside, is terrible, even from a design perspective. It's completely lacking in any kind of functionality and usability that you would expect from a tactical shooter. There is no way to plan your mission, no way to familiarize yourself with the layout of the level before going in. Changing your loadout is done from the main menu, and when you choose which loadout you want for a mission, you better have a good memory because it won't tell you which one is which, except for a number. No way to change, or even see any of the options once you're playing. There's no way to take down enemies non-lethally, no way to subdue them. The AI is absolutely horrendous. It'll run back and forth between two points, being completely indecisive about which is the better coverpoint, allowing you to kill them with ease. It'll snipe you from across the map with deadly precision, and if the enemy is not in your field of view, good luck trying to find out which direction the shot is coming from, as there are no indicators of the sort. The enemy also spawns randomly in the map, sometimes directly in front or behind you when you spawn, leading you to be killed the instant you begin the mission. There are no difficulty settings of any kind and the default seems to be on both ends of the extremes. The AI will react with lightning speed and kill you with deadly precision, or completely ignore you firing at the wall beside them. The friendly AI is just as bad. You can change between defensive/offensive/quiet/assault rules of engagement, or have them stay where they are or follow you. That's it. You can't order them to move to a specific location, can't ask them to open a door, can't order them to flashbang a room. The only them your friendly AI serves as, is lives and meatshields. I'm assuming this was supposed to be a multiplayer focused game, but the multiplayer hardly even works. Sometimes it won't connect to a game, other times, if you spam double-click a game enough, it works. There are no filters of any kind, and the modes that exist in singleplayer are not even present in the multiplayer lobby (Tango Hunt, Mission, Bomb Disarm). You can host a co-op mission just fine, but there doesn't seem to be any way to find them (Singleplayer can also quit on itself, telling you the "Connection to host has been lost".. What?). Once you're actually in a game, you can't see who you're actually playing with, can't see how many are left on the opposing team, there's no way to spectate if you join a game mid-round and you just end up looking at a wall. I read that this was because they felt scoreboards were unrealistic, but it just ends up feeling like a missing feature. They could easily have implemented a scoreboard that only showed the names of the players and which team they were on, but nope. There's also a horrendous text-to-speech feature that can't be turned off (In fact, there are hardly ANY options, and no way to turn off specific graphical effects, except through a config file). The menus themselves are also terrible. Some menus can not be quit out of by pressing "Escape", and you have to click the button that says "[Esc] Back". Sometimes it's the other way around; You can't click the back button, you HAVE to press escape. That something as simple as these menus are, are not working properly and consistently is baffling. The loadout menu is also completely unintuitive. To actually save a loadout you have to manually press "Y" to "Modify", even though you're actually saving it. Why not make it clearer what you have to do? If they had made the loadout part of the mission selection, it would have been less of a problem as you'd just select your weapons directly; You wouldn't have to remember them. Every old school tactical shooter that Takedown tries to emulate, such as Rainbow Six, SWAT 3/4 and the first Ghost Recon, is better in every single respect. For a minute, it had me doubting, if my memory of old-school shooters were somehow better than what the actual games were like. I installed Raven Shield, just to see if I was wrong, and thankfully, I was. It's not the genre that's broken, it's just this game. It feels completely empty and devoid of features, and as a Kickstarter game (I didn't back Takedown, personally), I can't help but feel bad for those who backed it. This game is a massive disappointment. Time to replay SWAT 4 and wash away the taste Takedown: Red Sabre left.