Indie Games Summer Uprising: Take Arms Review

Red versus green: a legendary strife whose vicious battles have ravaged the world and left it in tatters. Now, prepare to take arms and settle the score one and for all…or something like that. Take Arms doesn’t waste any time with “story” or provide any explanation why these chromatically-opposed forces are filling up graveyards in its post-apocalyptic world. They hate each other. Deal with it.

Take Arms is a 2D multiplayer militaristic shooter: think Call of Duty flattened into 2D and you’d be on the right path. One slight problem: as of right now, it’s a sort of lonely path. As with all multiplayer shooters, Take Arms is infinitely more fun with – you guessed it – multiple people. When you can find a group to play with, Take Arms can be a lot of fun; unfortunately, populated games were even scarcer than non-bombed out cars, and Take Arms doesn’t have a leg to stand on without competent adversaries and comrades.

Forgetting about the multiplayer issue for a minute, let’s delve a bit further into the nitty gritty of Take Arms. It comes with 3 maps and 3 fairly standard multiplayer modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag. There are 3 classes of dudes as well (sorry ladies, I guess your gender didn’t survive the apocalypse). The Striker is a sniper and you can click the right trigger to bring up zoomed-in crosshairs that you can move around the screen. This is probably the most innovative feature in the game, and it is balanced to provide you the chance to headshot an unsuspecting enemy while leaving you blind to attacks. The Grunt is your all-around machine-gun guy, while the Destroyer is similar, but packs an inaccurate, more powerful weapon. It’s not exactly an inspiring assortment of modes or characters, but it’s what you’d expect from a multiplayer shooter.

When I first started playing the game, I tried to find an online game but was saddened to find myself alone in the rubble. Dismayed, I played a few rounds of single player, which provided a great chance for me to get used to the game’s controls while not revealing myself to be the total n00b that I am to the public. Take Arms basically feels like a less frenetic, more methodically paced ZP2KX. Gone are the zombies in Viking helmets jetpacking around levels shooting bee guns and decapitating each other with flaming swords. In their place are soldiers taking cover behind cars while lobbing grenades back and forth and trying to avoid sniper fire from above.

While the single player allowed me to get my feet wet (with blood, of course), it also quickly proved to be not all that satisfying. As I mentioned before, there is not a single speck of story or level structure to be found in this game. The single player is identical to the multiplayer except you’ll play with bots that don’t know the difference between a grenade and a banana cream pie. On multiple occasions I witnessed a bot hover over a live grenade as if it expected it to start handing out ice cream cones.

When I was finally able to get into an online game (the developers are hosting games around 8 p.m. EST), I was able to see some of the game’s lingering potential. It’s impossible to deny the thrill of covering a teammate with sniper fire while he approaches an entrenched adversary or sneaking up on an enemy sniper from behind while he’s fixated on one of your squad mates. While there are only 3 levels, they’re sprawling with plenty of different areas to fight in. The verticality of the levels is particularly impressive, with tons of towers to climb and underground bunkers and tunnels.

The levels are also packed with obstacles like cars and sandbags, which made for a lot of skirmishes where players chucked extremely powerful grenades back and forth over the cover hoping to kill the enemy with one blast. Once the supply of grenades was depleted, players either took turns popping out of cover and shooting, or one brave fool kamikazed toward the opponent hoping to deal more damage than they absorbed. The other pervasive tactic is the melee attack, which is pretty damned busted. Melee attacks are always a one-hit kill, but landing them can be maddeningly frustrating. There were plenty of times when my opponent and I both ran at each other meleeing frantically to no avail, or even worse, sometimes we killed each other in a Rocky-like feat of simultaneous knockouts.

Another substantial issue for the game is that there just isn’t anything to play for. Look, you can argue all you want that Call of Duty and World of Warcraft are fun to play, but we all know that people get hooked because of the perks, upgrades, and loot. Take Arms has a ranking system where you gain numerical ranks, but they don’t unlock any new abilities or even cosmetic bonuses. A little tasty carrot would go a long way.

So is it all doom and gloom? Is the game a failure? Not necessarily. Online games rarely have flawless launches, and Discord Games is already talking about adding new levels, classes and tweaking the online play. It’s a work in progress for sure, and it’s a potential stepping stone for a really great game, but it’s just not there quite yet. There aren’t a lot of indie games that manage to pull off online multiplayer, and Take Arms practically requires it. Unfortunately, that’s both to its credit and its detriment.

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Take Arms was provided for review by Discord Games. It is available on the Xbox Live Marketplace for $3. 

By Mike Wall at September 8, 2011.

About Mike Wall

Mike grew up and lives near Philadelphia and has been intrigued with games ever since his parents preached that they rotted his brain. He studied journalism at Penn State and got his master's degree in secondary education before realizing that not even summers off would make that job palatable. He now works in marketing and is trying to find time to continue writing a book about zombies, aliens, vampires, the end of the world, and a talking cat.