Terrorist Takedown: More like Stereotype Shooter.

(content warning: Depictions of violence and war within.)

In 2021, it was announced that the previously canceled game Six Days in Fallujah was being brought back. With some of the original development team handling development, it naturally got a lot of backlash now just as it did back in 2009: by glorifying a specific military conflict as a good thing, and feeding into middle eastern stereotypes of them being nothing but terrorists. So much so that the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) asked for major publishers to drop support for the game. Six Days in Fallujah will likely come out to poor reception, if it actually comes out this time.

Seeing this made me think a lot about the glut of military games made in a post-9/11 world. While war games existed before that tragedy – Novalogic’s Delta Force franchise was modestly popular around the late 1990s – they ballooned to being rather ubiquitous once the War on Terror started. Franchises like SOCOM, Conflict, lots of Tom Clancy games, even Battlefield dipped its toes into modern warfare around this time. There were so many that actual US military organizations started getting involved with games like as America’s Army and PRISM: Guard Shield. Nowadays the only franchise from that period still around making war games is Call of Duty, but that might be considered a stretch.

All this preamble is so I can talk about one of those games made by a budget label that cashed in on the War on Terror, and is a bad game, not just on a technical level, but a moral one as well.

(Yeah this cover looks incredibly generic alright.)

Terrorist Takedown is the first installment in a franchise covering the war on terror. Developed by Polish developer City Interactive, this would be one of their early breakout hits. While nowadays they’re known as simply CI Games, their overall message has been consistent: Make many games based on war conflicts old and new, and sell them in bargain bins everywhere. 

For Terrorist Takedown however, City Interactive didn’t have much of a presence outside of Europe, so another budget publisher, Merscom, handled the release here in the United States. Merscom even touted that some of the profits would be donated to the Special Operations Warrior Foundation. Which I guess is a grand gesture.

(Probably the most bland menu screen I've ever seen.)

There is no story to Terrorist Takedown. You play a bunch of no-name, faceless soldiers as you’re sent from one conflict zone to the next, taking down terrorists left and right.

(Charlie Don't Surf this ain't.)

The missions themselves are rather varied: The first mission has you in a helicopter gunship mowing down anti-air emplacements and random soldiers. The second mission has you protect a convoy from enemy soldiers and RPGs. Each mission is similar in structure: Survive a conflict of terrorists while protecting objectives and not dying. At least it spices things up a bit, from using machine gun turrets to flying a helicopter, to controlling a targeting reticle on a surface-to-air-missile.

(With such a simple control scheme, anyone could play it, I guess.)

Notice that there’s no movement like a contemporary FPS. It’s all styled like a rail shooter, with the mouse controlling a cursor on screen to shoot targets. The only exception are the few helicopter missions, and the movement there is so bad and wild that often times my helicopter was attacking targets it couldn’t see on screen.

(Jesus, commander, are you getting off to doing this stuff?)

While the game plays terribly, it’s also terrible in another way. The game is not shy in treating these people as bonafide bad guys. You’ll have a commanding officer spew lines like “Waste those assholes before they can blink” and compliment you for killing lots of enemies. While I’m not expecting moral ambiguity out of a budget game – This isn’t Spec Ops: The Line, after all – it does make me feel uncomfortable, especially since this game’s release there’s been reports of US soldiers spouting a lot of similar nasty messages, as well as stuff like the Abu Ghraib prison incident. While City Interactive probably weren’t deliberately being offensive with that dialogue, it’s just one of those things that’s pretty gross in retrospect.

Now, I usually try to beat the games I’m writing about for this site. I’ve beaten the budget schlock I’ve written about here like Elite Forces WWII: Iwo Jima, Alpha Prime, and Enemy Front. I even beat Battleborn before it shut down. But I couldn’t finish Terrorist Takedown for this article.

(Hope you can home in on it before it goes away!)

The sixth mission required me to destroy helicopters by having a hard-to-see white crosshair lock into a box until I could fire missiles. If I let too many helicopters escape my explosive wrath, the mission fails and I have to start all over. A lot of these missions don’t give the player enough leeway to pass, which I assume is deliberate design, as each mission is no more than 2-5minutes each.

With that SAM turret being so frustrating to control and with particularly questionable design decisions that I honestly feel that I’d seen enough of the game to justify writing about it.

(Can you find the targeting ring in this picture? No points if you do.)

Even after looking ahead by watching playthroughs on YouTube, I see that the mission variety doesn’t really change that much. The following mission has the player shoot down helicopters with a rocket launcher much like the last mission, more sections involving flying helicopters, using machine gun emplacements and artillery. I don’t think it’s worth suffering to see it through.

To further support my decision, I found a GameSpot review written by Erik Wolpaw – yes, that Erik Wolpaw, writer of the award-winning Psychonauts and Portal – where he couldn’t get past the final stage and still gave it a review, so I feel justified in giving my say here despite breaking one of my cardinal rules.

Terrorist Takedown must’ve been a modest success for City Interactive, as for a while throughout the 2000s they used that brand rather heavily in the US and Europe. A standalone expansion called Terrorist Takedown: Payback was released not long after and was identical gameplay-wise. Since City Interactive was a publisher as well as a developer, they worked with other developers to make similar military games. One such example as Jarhead Games, makers of previous article Marine Sharpshooter, would develop Army Ranger: Mogadishu, which was branded as a Terrorist Takedown game in some European markets.

(At least I can see the enemies this time without needing an obnoxious red border.)

Eventually City Interactive branched out on their own again, making the games in-house with Terrorist Takedown: War in Colombia and Terrorist Takedown: Covert Operations, before making an actual Terrorist Takedown 2 in 2008. By this time, City Interactive abandoned the varied rail-shooter style of the first Terrorist Takedown games in exchange for more conventional FPS gameplay. First using Techland’s engine used for Chrome, for before switching to Monolith’s Lithtech Jupiter EX engine – the engine that powered F.E.A.R.and many of Monolith’s games thereafter – for the next two installments.

(A lot of City Interactive’s games during this Lithtech period basically made every game look like a mod for F.E.A.R. A shame they’re not nearly as polished.)

While the Terrorist Takedown brand ended in 2010 with Terrorist Takedown 3, City Interactive has carved a surprising niche, as they still release fairly middling budget titles based on war conflicts and other events. In 2019, they released Sniper: Ghost Warrior – Contracts, the fourth installment in that long-running franchise, now running on Crytek’s CryEngine. They'd eventually find a modest hit, with a not-military shooter: Lords of the Fallen. 

While they also double as a budget publisher for some games in Europe, they still putter along making fairly average shooters for a market that’s pretty much dying on the vine. It’s like they still think it’s the mid-2000s.

(If you ever play this and wonder what that missing texture is on the right, now you know.)

There are two more things I wanna say about this game. One of which is that in early development they were intending to use images of missing persons in the credits. That got vetoed pretty late in development, thus viewing the credits gives a blank checkerboard image on the right with no context. I found this out from someone who was working at Merscom not long after the game had shipped, and this is probably the only place you’re gonna find out about that bit of “trivia.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jgznkG-OrM 

Finally, there’s a music video for this game. A band named Analog – which have a page on the Polish Wikipedia, amusingly enough – perform a song called “Lives” set to footage from the game. It seems like a strange inclusion since it doesn’t play in-game, but there is a reason it’s there: Analog’s bassist, Paweł Gawlik, also worked on Terrorist Takedown’s music. He probably thought it would be some good cross-promotion, and maybe make the song a minor hit somewhere. An instrumental version of this song plays in the menus, and the rest of  the music is probably the only high point of this game but that’s not saying much.

(I could say something dirty but I'd rather not, especially after playing this.)

Terrorist Takedown is a fascinating artifact. A byproduct of the War on Terror, and as a result has aged poorly, much like the war on terror itself. It’s not worth your time to play it, though there’s playthroughs of it on YouTube if you’re morbidly curious. If I knew how much of a hot mess this game was gonna be when I bought it back in 2013, I would’ve left it on the CD rack of the thrift store I bought it from.

I feel like I need something lighter to write about next time.