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Think before you shoot.

If you’re starting to feel like there’s too much Call of Duty in every shooter out there, you’re not the only one. With pressure from fans of the almost extinct strategic shooter sub-genre, designer Christian Allen spearheaded a Kickstarter project to keep this methodical niche on life support a little longer. Allen is self-admittedly part of the “problem” of shifting slower-paced shooters to mainstream sensibilities during his years of working on the Ghost Recon franchise. His current game, Takedown: Red Sabre, throws all of those years of mainstreaming the genre right out of the AC-130 Gunship’s window and promises to give us the realistic, slow-paced, strategic squad shooter we’ve been missing. 

Allen’s initial forays into map modding and design were with strategic shooters like Rainbow Six before he moved into full-time work in the triple-A space, where he eventually worked his way up to lead designer on Halo: Reach. He’s gathered together other designers that have also done their time on high profile titles and are looking to return to what they miss the most. The team includes several members from the shuttered Zipper Interactive, makers of SOCOM, who were freed up to work on Takedown: Red Sabre at just about the perfect time. All of this passionate talent is apparent in the one map I was able to play through (with minimal success) at QuakeCon.

Everything centers on you and your squad completing objectives as part of a for-hire military organization. There is no regenerating health or even respawning when you’re tackling these missions – if you die, it’s up to your team to finish the fight without you. The difficulty of doing this was quickly made apparent when I promptly ended up dead before I even realized there was an enemy just out of my peripheral vision. Once we started anew, I had a bit more success each time and got to take out a few bad guys before they got me.

Using the keyboard and mouse felt fluid and natural pretty quickly even though I have almost completely abandoned that setup for shooters. I used the leaning mechanic with E and Q constantly to check around corners before I could proceed anywhere. Leaning isn’t a foolproof means of looking ahead like it is in a lot of recent stealth games either, since enemies will see you poking your head out and pop off a few shots at your noggin. Getting spotted like this could lead to your demise, since each surface can be penetrated, depending on the weapon and ammunition being fired into it.

The weapons also sport realistic characteristics: heavy recoil when appropriate, and absolutely no sticky- or auto-aiming. Getting to know all of the ammo and weapon combinations – and what they’re capable of – will take some time, but you’ll have to make the effort in order to determine the best grouping of firearms to use in each mission. There are no classes to make the choices obvious for you and your teammates, either. Each player has access to every weapon and ammo as soon as they start the game. This should give you a huge variety of ways to tackle each level, even if you’ve beaten it many times before.

Everyone accustomed to modern shooters will notice that there are no obvious linear paths to take you from start to finish in each level. The buildings you’ll be infiltrating in the close-quarters maps all have numerous entry and exit points, as well as varying means to traverse their interiors. You’ll also notice there are no big set pieces or scene-stealing triggered events. You’re being sent to these locations to do a job, not to pull at the player’s heartstrings. Gameplay is the focus here, with level layout being a top priority, and player motivations and environmental aesthetics getting filled in later. Allen was happy to point out that the art style they are using eschews the grays and browns we see all the time in favor of a more realistic and deep color palette.

The game is getting an Xbox Live port along with a release on Steam (and possibly other PC services), but people used to handicaps for using a controller will be out of luck. There will be no concessions made for transitioning to thumbsticks if you play on the console in place of using WASD on the PC. That means you are going to have to practice even more if you go that route since the game is already pretty demanding.

It’s a bit hard to get a feel for how expansive the game will feel from my short time with just one level, but it’s easy to tell that the mechanics and systems are definitely going to please a lot of players who’ve felt abandoned of late. Since I struggle in my old age to keep up with twitchy shooters, and definitely can’t take the time to level up and get all of the XP-based gear needed to be successful, jumping in to Takedown: Red Sabre has a lot of appeal. There’s a good chance that the audience isn’t going to extend much beyond those willing to chip in to the Kickstarter campaign, but for a game like this, that might be all that’s necessary. Giving dedicated fans of serious shooters something they’ve been deprived of for so long is a great gift, and they aren’t likely to take it for granted.