The Outfit

Relic's World War II strategy shooter isn't quite the real deal.

THQ and developer Relic Entertainment take some paths less travelled in The Outfit. It is a squad-based combat action game that also has some strategy elements in it. Unfortunately the good idea this represents does not make it 100 percent to the controller or the monitor and The Outfit thus fails to be a fully-satisfying game.

Running up to the release of The Outfit, THQ’s marketing department would have us think this game was some kind of raucous frat house of a World War II game: irreverent and funny. I even think I recall a person from Relic very proud of the fact that no historical advisor was used on the game. Sadly, The Outfit never lives up to the advance hype and is just another disposable-story game in which every half-hearted attempt at humour falls flat.

The military outfit the game refers to is made up of Captain Deuce Williams, Lieutenant J.D. Tyler and Sergeant Thomas "Mac" Macintyre. Each of these men holds his own specialty. Deuce has a rocket launcher and is a master of melee. J.D. is the sniper. Mac is the mid-range man with a submachine gun. Each also has a secondary weapon for when things gets close. (Though Mac’s flamethrower was so short-ranged that I found myself running into my own flames while shooting and moving. Many friendly-fire casualties later, I learned that puppy was best left in the pack.) In addition, each also carries his own brand of unlimited explosive, respectively: grenades, Molotov cocktails and sticky bombs.

As our story opens, the heroes are investigating a massacre that occurred in a French village. A fanatical German general named von Beck is suspected. Our brave lads set out to catch up with and kill him. Along the way to catching this butcher they will meet up with a beautiful resistance fighter, a treacherous priest and an ally they did not expect. Oh, yeah, and one of them will fall in battle.

The story is not really well put together, but it works well enough to bridge the 12 missions. It is just too bad the hype had gamers thinking they were getting something they actually don’t. You expect Kelly’s Heroes and you get Sgt. Rock.

At the beginning of each mission you’ll be given a choice of which hero you want to play as. Each time you get killed during a mission (and you will get killed during the missions) you get to choose again. Did you get killed because you were using mid-range Mac and something got you from across the field? Perhaps Deuce and his rockets or J.D. and his rifle can get you past that point better.

The missions are extremely linear in nature. They are really just a series of objectives and there is no choice about which way you’ll go. There is fighting from cover, but very little actual manoeuvring for the enemy’s flanks. What you do have each time you start fresh is a squad of four guys to command. They can lay down suppressing fire, assault and one other command specific to the character being played. Unfortunately it is still mostly attacking into the teeth of a strongpoint.

What really tips the balance in your favour is the "Destruction on Demand" feature. Destruction on demand is the means by which you can bring in all manner of reinforcements and equipment. Radio where you want it and an aircraft drops it to you is seconds. Equipment includes tanks, armoured cars, half-tracks and armed jeeps. You and your squad can pile in and have a whale of a time blasting away at every Nazi roaming the battlefield. You can also drop in fixed defensive items like heavy machineguns and anti-tank guns to hold an area or to supplement your own firepower during an assault.

Every item you buy costs Field Units. Field Units (FUs) are the currency of The Outfit and they are earned for almost everything from reaching an objective to destroying enemy units. Items range from as little as 100 FU for a .30 calibre machinegun up to items in excess of 1,000 FU like the rocket-firing Sherman tank. FUs buy you air strikes and artillery barrages for when you need to bust a roadblock or take out a particularly stubborn emplacement. They also repair items and bring in additional squad members as you take casualties. Learning to judiciously use your FUs to keep yourself mobile and protected becomes the most useful strategy in the game.

Of course you don’t get all the weapons at once. You’ll earn bigger and better hardware along the way. And you won’t have access to all items from the beginning of each mission. To buy vehicles you must have captured a motor pool. Guns require capturing an armoury. And air strikes and artillery support require capturing a radio tower. Of course once captured these points must be held against any counter attack. Sometimes that is easy and other times it is not

This all sounds pretty good, but there are some problems in execution. As mentioned, the missions are very linear. They also get rather repetitive. More gets thrown at you and you’ll meet up with tougher units, but it does not really require a change in play style. There are way too many places you can’t go. If a wall falls after being hit you’d expect that you could go in a building and take cover, right? Not generally true here. There are all sorts of restrictions on movement that keep you from ever really strategically moving your units.

Weapons have weird quirks. A direct hit on a man with a cannon shell will turn him into mincemeat. But an explosion from the same shell a foot from his feet might knock him down but he’ll just get up and keep coming at you. Weapons never run out of ammunition, but they overheat way too quickly and the heavier ones have odiously low rates of fire. Vehicle manoeuvring is extremely problematic. Most unforgivable is hit detection problems that will have you ready to throw your controller at the on-screen target when your well-lined-up headshot from the best sniper rifle the game offers fails to even register with a bad guy.

In addition to the single-player mode there are a good variety of multiplayer options, though number of players is limited. Two can play with one system and TV. Via System Link and Live the maximum number of players is eight. That is a bit low, but it must be taken into consideration that in multiplayer each person is still leading a squad of four around the battlefield and emplacing gun units, so with eight human leaders it really gets crowded and chaotic. The Outfit is actually one of those rare games which its play mechanic lends itself better to the multiplayer experience. I did have some problems on Xbox Live with lag, but I can’t be sure if the newness of the game was attracting a lot of players and bogging down the servers or if there was some other problem.

Visually the game is very uneven. Many textures hardly look next-gen quality. The characters are rather clunky in appearance, especially in the cut scenes. It looks about like an above-average Xbox game. The sound is pretty good, though it never really rattles your teeth. Music is only okay with mostly marshal-type stuff. Voice acting is so-so with some real bargain basement French and German accents and stereotypical tough-guy performances for the game’s heroes.

Playing The Outfit through in the single-player campaign was a bit of a letdown. There are enough problems in the games execution to not fully endorse it. On the other hand it does sport some interesting play mechanics that I’d really like to see explored further in other games. It also lends itself well to multiplayer gaming. In the end analysis I think I had enough fun with it to give it a "B-" score. I argued bitterly with myself about dropping that into the "C" range, but there was enough shining through the other problems to give it above an average score on the potential it shows.

This review comes courtesy of our friends at Gameshark.com .