TASTEE: Lethal Tactics (PC)

TASTEE: Lethal Tactics can and will piss you off in interesting ways. This is a game that allows you to run infinite scenarios on the battlefield, tweaking and changing until you have it just right, then still blast your army in half with a laugh. It’s an interesting concept that you don’t see all that often, sort of like digital chess with firearms. Painstakingly place your gunner, sniper, explosives expert, your musclebound, barrier-crashing bomber, agonize over the myriad possible scenarios, then watch your team get cut down by automatic gunfire anyways. TASTEE is painfully frustrating, tedious and repetitive. And for the most part, it’s also a lot of fun.

X-COM not hard enough for ya?

Skybox Labs has cobbled together a cornucopia of features and mechanics from other games; a little X-COM, a dash of Final Fantasy Tactics, some Frozen Synapse (to name a few), and made something all their own. There are two basic parts to TASTEE; the planning aspect and the execution. It’s sort of like designing a play in basketball; you scope out the opposition as best you can, put your players in the most advantageous positions possible, pore over the X’s and O’s, run some practice scenarios, then eventually execute and hope for the best, sitting on the sidelines and watching your players run your plan. There is a pretty hardcore learning curve in TASTEE, and the tutorial is bare bones at best. As I moved through the game’s early stages, I kept hoping for more hints or short tutorials, but TASTEE largely teaches you the game the same way it plays; in fits and starts, through painful trial and error.

The story serves as more of a vehicle for the action rather than an engaging nail-biting adventure. You begin with some talk about your band of mercenaries taking down a drug cartel, and from then on it’s less talk and more trigger. You stop teams of assassins, disrupt bad-guy plans, intercept weapon shipments and other rather generic action tropes. There are no cutscenes, and most of the plot just serves to introduce new characters, although there is a fun sense of humor pervading these rather short exchanges that somewhat endears you to your mercenaries.

Merc mixing

The meat and potatoes of TASTEE is comprised of choosing a team from four classes: Snipers, Bombers, Shotgunners and Gunmen, and the different classes come with different abilities, each of them crucial to surviving with your team intact. Losing a character is not as emotionally devastating as say, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, since you don’t level and customize your TASTEE mercs like you do with your soldiers in XCOM, and it isn’t permadeath either. However, you will be crushed to lose a given soldier because even if you don’t miss the shotgunner on a personal level, you damn sure will miss his abilities for the rest of the mission. Some abilities can penetrate the fog of war, others allow you to see through walls, give you increased health, smash through barriers, etc. Although at first I found a lot of these abilities to be simple perks that weren’t a big deal, as I got better (a slow, painful, often frustrating experience) I found out how important these abilities can be.

Losing one character can often near-cripple the rest of your squad, and you’ll feel the absence of their abilities acutely. This is good and bad; bad because sometimes the loss of one member can make a mission twice as difficult, but good because it helps TASTEE do what it sets out to, which is making you careful and cautious. Many times I would want to just restart after losing certain squad members, and I can’t even count the number of times I would lose a member of my squad and five minutes later say "Oh, nice, I’ll just use my…(cycling through my characters)… now where is my…? Oooooooh, God…D£#*?@T!”. It really ratchets up the tension, and makes the planning stage all the more crucial. If you don’t have a high level of patience or attention to detail, TASTEE might not be for you.

And boy, will you live and die by the details. There are a lot of little things to consider in TASTEE when you are in the planning phase. Even running from point A to point B can be drenched in deadly mistakes if you aren’t paying close attention. Forgot to set a “duck/crouch point” when you ran past those waist high sandbags? Dead. Forgot to click the ability to smash through a barrier? The next two members of your team who are following you are dead. Successfully dodge all enemy sight points, then walk right up to an enemy but you forgot to swivel your cone of vision? Dead. TASTEE demands your respect and attention, and the “real” tutorial is pretty Dark Souls-esque; die until you figure it out.

Not just "tastee" – It looks good too!

TASTEE would be significantly diminished without clever map design, and luckily it has that in spades. It took me a substantial amount of trial and error, but once you figure out how to use the maps effectively, the game becomes quite a bit easier, not to mention more fun. Setting up choke-points, ambushes and strategic sniper positioning makes things a blast, and it’s a joy to watch it all come together. Setting up the battle, thinking two steps ahead of your enemy, then hitting “go” and watching your opponents walk directly into your trap(s) brings up a feeling of accomplishment that is a bit different than most games I’ve played. The only problem I have is that when you zoom out it makes things tough to see, and you’ll want to see every sight line, window, wall and enemy. You’ll mainly be looking at the battlefield with your zoom almost all the way maxed out the majority of the time.

The animation and character design reminded me of some kind of cross between TimeSplitters and Team Fortress, a cartoony look that fits the game’s often goofy sense of humor. The explosions are accompanied by cartoonish puffs of dust, and the weapons are comically oversized in most cases. Graphically the game looks great. The mercs are fun to look at and are varied enough to where they really stand out from one another, and the sound is good as well. There are no real voiceovers and the story is told through text, but the explosions and gunfire all sound satisfying.

Not all sunshine and blood-spattered roses

One problem I have to point out is an odd one for a game like this to have. Basically, when you have some of your mercs close together, manipulating their individual abilities/commands can be a real pain. The problem is the buttons you need to click are absolutely tiny, making it tough to see what you need, and making it hard to click on the correct button. It’s pretty easy to accidentally click the wrong character or button, which sucks, especially when choosing the wrong action can potentially get you killed.

Another issue I had is the enemy AI. It’s pretty darn good for the most part, but sometimes the game didn’t seem to play by its own rules. Shots that should have been taken sometimes aren’t, and some glitchy stuff occasionally cropped up, like my soldier not firing when an enemy was clearly in his cone of vision. I feel like in most games I would excuse this kind of thing, because what game is completely bug-free, but the issue with a game like TASTEE is that a hiccup like this can throw an entire mission off track, which feels pretty unforgivable given the amount of planning you have to put into each one. Playing against actual human players seemed to mitigate some of these mistakes to a certain degree, leading me to believe that the computer is giving the AI leeway occasionally. It’s not enough to screw the whole game up by any means, but it happened often enough to make me pretty angry a few times at having to restart or re-plan the mission through no fault of my own.