Overview
Basically this game is Mercenaries set in WWII, with a capture system like the Battlefield series. You play as one of the selectable characters, each with unique weapons and stats to take on the seemingly endless horde of Nazi troops. This game also has up to 8-player multiplayer over Live, or 2-player split-screen on one Xbox 360.
Gameplay
As mentioned before this game is a lot like mercenaries in the sense that nearly everything is destroyable. The game’s “Destruction on Demand” tagline lives up to its name allowing you to para-drop any of your unlocked vehicles and turrets to your position at any time and wreak havoc on your enemies. Each mission basically consists of “take this base! Now protect it from these paratroopers! Now go here! Hey look more Nazis! Now take this base! Now you can build cooler stuff! You’ll need to because now you have to take this base!” Rinse, and repeat. Each of the three characters you can choose from in single player has two unique weapons, different stats, and one ‘special command’. One example is as one character has a special command to ‘assault’. Each character has one upgradeable weapon, which you will receive (and sometimes a new vehicle added to your para-drop list) at the end of a mission. The weapons, whether using them on-foot or while driving, seem underpowered a bit. The explosions are big, yet they don’t do much but take out the one guy you aimed for while everyone else around him just gets knocked down and hardly seem to take any damage. Turrets seem to overheat too quickly, and the flamethrower just doesn’t seem as fun as it should be (e.g. The flamethrower in Halo: CE for the PC… was fun).
Controls
The Outfit’s main problem lies in the controls. When you’re on-foot there really isn’t a problem but once you step into a vehicle the ‘fun’ starts. It’s a little hard to explain what exactly the problem is, but it sure does make a good part of the game needlessly harder than it should be. Trying to make a quick turn-around to go back and re-capture one of your own bases has become harder than it sounds. The turrets on the vehicles have in unnecessarily small range of movement, so if the one last troop you’re trying to take out of a Nazi group runs up too close, you’ll have to either step out of whatever you’re driving, or attempt to back up without flipping over a rock or something. To add to that for some reason judging how to aim rockets is near impossible.
Graphics
The graphics here aren’t horrible, but they really don’t do the Xbox 360 any justice. Though it does prevent slowdowns well, it really could and should be better for a next-generation title such as this one. My guess is they let down on the graphics to enhance the number of enemies, explosions, and pieces of whatever you just blew up on screen and reduce system lag. As I said, there sure is a lot of explosions. That’s one thing The Outfit handles well is the amount of action on screen at any time. Each individual piece of whatever you blow up flies apart. I think is new to the videogame industry – we haven’t really seen too much destructible environments around too many games yet. I haven’t seen a game where, when you take a rocket to a pile of sandbags, each individual bag goes flying out in every direction. Just about anything in the game is destroyable but it doesn’t do much to help the gameplay at all other than for taking out bridges which is rather useful in multiplayer. Although the graphics of the game aren’t what we should be seeing with the new-era of graphics, it certainly doesn’t suck. It is still visually pleasing and does it job just as it should.
Final Word
This game, though annoying at points, is still very fun. If you can look past the bad vehicle controls, and don’t really care about graphics then by all means buy this game. It’s simply the repetitive missions, and the controls, that seemed to bring this game down a few notches for me.
And the Scores...
Gameplay: 3Audio: 3Story: 3Multiplayer: 4Replay value: 4Cooperative: 4Overall: 3/5
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