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TV show Leverage: Redemption has a great esports villain, even if its fake “fighting MOBA” is bafflingI cannot for the life of me figure out how to play Illumatrons
I cannot for the life of me figure out how to play Illumatrons
Image credit:Leverage 2.0 TV Holdings
Image credit:Leverage 2.0 TV Holdings
Leverage: Redemption (the post-cancellation continuation of Leverage) is a dramedy where a team of master criminals use their skills to help the hopeless. With a grifter, hacker, thief, fixer, and punchman, every episode is a con, or a heist, or a con concealing a heist, or a heist to double-cross a con heist heist con. Great fun. In the 2022 episode The Journament Job, the team help the sister of an esports player who’s mighty concerned about her brother Tam’s health and freedom ahead of a major tournament.
Image credit:Leverage 2.0 TV Holdings
We must talk about the game. Former corporate lawyer Harry (Noah Wyle, aka Carter off ER) declares Illumatrons to be “my favourite third-person cyberpunk fighting MOBA” and, well, I guess I can see elements of that if I squint. Players use MOBA terms like “diving”, the UI has MOBA-y elements, and the whole game does have the look of some 2015 MOBA which would have shut down before even leaving early access, but that’s about all. In the short clips of mocked-up action, I’m not sure I see MOBA or fighting game.
Even followingthe Criminal Minds methodof guessing how a fake game would work, the best I can do is: it’s a 5v5 fighting game based heavily on out-planning your enemy before even throwing a punch. Professionally it’s played 5v5 on PC with keyboard and mouse, though the Leverage gang also play 1v1 with gamepads. Each round is a single teamfight where players initially pair off in 1v1s, and ends when one team is wiped out. Fights seem to unfold in a short sequence of moves which lock characters into long animations. Perhaps there’s a rock-paper-scissors element of picking the right move. Or perhaps there’s a lot of invisible high-APM skill in either continuing or breaking out from attacks? It doesn’t really matter, because the tournament Typhoon 7 is coming and the team Samurai Midnight are under a lot of pressure to win.
Like, I feel I half-remember posting about this game being cancelled, you know? |Image credit:Leverage 2.0 TV Holdings
Prick |Image credit:Leverage 2.0 TV Holdings
Kyle Fury is a delightfully loathsome composite of gaming-adjacent influencers, scammers, and pricks. He aches to become a wealthy and respected business personality (his idol is an NFL player-turned-esports investor) and to hell with everyone else. As he says, “The only winner that matters is me.” And if Samurai Midnight burn out, he’ll just get a new team and “pump them full of whatever I want”. The scenario is wildly exaggerated but it works because enough parts feel woefully familiar. Of course Kyle did crypto. Of course he’s using players' dreams against them. Of course he’s a “clean living warrior”. Of course he sells his own supplements. Of course his mouth is full of influencer wank.
“Illumatrons, it’s not just a game,” Kyle explains at one point. “Samurai Midnight, it’s not just a team. It’s a lifestyle. It’s a philosophy that allows you to control your own destiny. That’s what I’m giving these kids. I’m creating winners.”
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Evo Moment #37 was the point in Evo’s 2004 Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike tournament where, with only a sliver left in his health bar, Daigo Umehara’s Ken parried 15 consecutive kicks from the special move of Justin Wong’s Chun-Li. The crowd go wild, and grow wilder as the parries keep coming. Daigo then turns it around and tears through Justin in four seconds to take the round. The room explodes and the camera turns to face the screaming spectators now on their feet. That clip has spread far beyond fighting game fanatics. Even if you don’t know Street Fighter, don’t understand exactly what he was doing nor how precise the timing was, you know you’ve seen something special.
Image credit:Leverage 2.0 TV Holdings
Oh, and what happens with Kyle Fury and Samurai Midnight? I’ll not recap the episode, but the Leverage crew plan to take him down with Illumatrons entrapment. They infiltrate his inner circle and offer him a “predictive cheating AI” that can scale all the way from boosting your stats for a subtle advantage to outright taking control and playing for you. With the tournament’s games hosted in a server van out back, they plan to film him breaking in to install the cheat and then expose him. But does any con go off without hitches and twists?
You can watch the Leverage: Redemption episode The Tournament Job for freeon Amazon’s Freevee, the ad-supported service previously known as IMDb TV.
Parker ditches her cool thief fashion for this cybersuit and t-shirt cannon at the very end, and I suppose I should be grateful that the episode demonstrated restraint for as long as it did |Image credit:Leverage 2.0 TV Holdings
