Ok, I installed it and gave it an initial trial run. I thought I'd give a brief unbiased review of what I've found so far about the game.
The graphics are not too bad overall but they're not 2014 era, but more like 2008 era for the most part but that's fine by me. I still enjoy playing FPS games that are 2000 era graphics so that's fine. The options do not appear to allow you to have fine grained control over graphic detail settings like most modern games though, just the resolution and on overall Graphic Detail setting. No control over antialiasing, shadows, filtering, etc. The game engine runs rather slow at 2560x1600 native resolution of my monitor which is both surprising and disappointing considering I can run games like Tomb Raider (2013) and Bioshock Infinite at the same resolution with the effects cranked out the wazoo. I'll have to either drop the graphic detail down a notch or two, or drop the resolution down to 1920x1200 later and see if that will pick up the framerate at all. Just some observations mind you, nothing to complain about for a $1.49 game that I got for free. :)
I tried the 2 training missions which for all intents and purposes look identical with just a different weapon. The training missions seem like something is missing... a voice guiding you or something, and the training level seems like the design of it was never completed, especially on the second one which doesn't really let you do much of anything. All in all, you don't really learn anything at all in the training missions and if you've ever played any FPS game before ever, you already know how to do anything and everything the training missions might teach you. Just looking over the keyboard control options, or even just randomly mashing the buttons to see what does what is enough to train yourself how to play within a few minutes.
I started the first mission which you have to diffuse 3 bombs and access a server or something. My initial impressions are that moving around feels as if you're carrying 300 pounds of weight or something, the character moves far too slow, and using the run key only picks the pace up by maybe 10-15% and isn't even really jogging speed. Using the crouch key causes your height to drop by about 3 inches max judging from looking at a fixed point on a wall and toggling crouch, which doesn't really do much to help stay in cover or steady your aim, again it seems like a feature that was partly implemented but not tweaked and polished. The enemy AI is lacklustre so far and not too bright. They seem either dumb as a post, or they can shoot you through walls and around corners LOL. I died a lot but it was mostly because I was getting a crappy framerate due to the game engine struggling to pump out the pixels at 2560x1600. As such it was a little difficult to proceed and I failed the mission 3 times.
I'm going to give it another whirl tomorrow with the graphics reconfigured to give a better framerate so I can totally concentrate on gameplay dynamics and not fight the low frame rate problems I encountered. That should give a more balanced feel for what the gameplay is actually like without the latency issues. It's possible that the feeling of being shot through walls and around corners might very well be due to latency caused by low framerate issues. I've seen that before in games so it wouldn't be uncommon.
The walk and run speeds of your character are unbelievably slow though, and they do not have that realistic feel of your body swaying from side to side while walking/running that makes FPS games feel more immersive, instead having that 1990's style orthagonal walking style that makes you feel more like a robot gliding across the floor at a fixed speed. Mind you, there are even AAA games coming out to this day that implement walking like that still. I really wish that ALL FPS game developers would implement walking with a realistic bobbing effect to give that additional immersiveness, whether a game is a military shooter, or a game like Portal or an RPG. That will only become more and more important when people start gaming with the Oculus Rift I believe.
One thing I did kind of like is how you can configure the loadout of each character class type and save them. I always wished that the Ghost Recon games would let you do things like that. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter sort of let you do it a little bit for the 4 soldier types, being able to save one loadout per type in OGR Co-op missions at least but other modes of gameplay lacked it. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 on the other hand forces you to manually configure loadout every single time the map is loaded or restarted which can be a huge headache sucking time from gameplay while teammates wait. So the loadout configuration in Takedown Red Sabre seems to have tried to at least solve that problem and make an improvement to weapon selection. I'll need to experiment with it to determine if it is as cracked up as it seems to be at a first glance though.
Anyhow, that's my brief first time trial play mini-review for now. My second session will probably be slugging through several levels after I sort out the graphics problems, but the game does seem a bit klunky and unfinished so far overall as if they ran out of budget and needed to ship the game as-is or suffer financial losses or something. :) I'll give it a good run for the second session though for sure.
