Brute Force (or why Halo is Microsoft’s worst enemy at times)
No, it’s not as good as Halo.
Still reading?
I guess I should go into more detail than that. Well, Brute Force’s main USP (Unique Selling Point, industry acronym fans) is that it’s a squad-based third person shooter, meaning that you can order your team members around and position them in strategically important ways. Sounds pretty cool.
Doesn’t really work that well in practice though, which is a damn shame. Most of the team your team members are controlled by the CPU, and most of the time they do what you think they should be doing in their given situation. But when they do do something stupid like walk directly into the line of fire, run back to their hiding point and then run back out in the open again like they dropped their school bag on a zebra crossing…it will make you scream. They also have the tendency to get stuck against the most obscure things, which is especially annoying when you have to backtrack over the level to find them.
Each team member has a special ability that lets them work, rest and play…wait, that’s my Mars bar wrapper. Sorry. It’s just that it’s more interesting than the unique talents each of your generic team members has to offer. One of them has a super laser beam, Cyclops-style, another can act all Solid Snake style and sneak around the shadows slitting people’s throats…but if only you could harness the power of Cocoa Butter, Soy Lecithin and Emulsifier (Lucisin) then we’d have a game. The problem is that the special abilities, for all their vaunted coolness, simply aren’t as practical as a loaded machine gun. It’s always easier to just wade into the fray with guns a-blazing than to set up a team mate at the right spot and aim them in the right direction.
Gameplay is very stop and start in nature. One minute you’re cutting a swathe (what exactly is a swathe anyway? It’s not in the manual) through enemy forces and the next you’re on a mission to find key X that opens door Y. The swathe cuttery is all well and good but going back and forth over the (very pretty) levels gets tiresome real quick, especially when you have to find one of your team mates who is stuck against something really hard to get around…like a branch, or a large rock.
I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to give Brute Force such a thrashing. It does have its good points – honest! I really like how when you’re low on health the screen gets blurry. Um, and the sound effects are really good. Nice big and meaty sound effects when you rip into a crowd of aliens is always a good thing. The indoor environments are really, really well designed, with a true sense of structure and plenty of scope for strategy and tension when multiplayer mode kicks in. Graphically it’s a good showcase for the Xbox’s graphical grunt, with plenty of the usual meaningless graphical tricks (bump mapping, per-pixel lighting, you know the drill) to make the more insecure people out there glad they bought an Xbox.
But it’s still not as good as Halo, and that’s all I need to say before people’s eyes start to glaze over and they begin to ask when Halo 2 is coming out. Bungie’s FPS masterpiece has set the standard bar so high that nothing else can touch it. And that, unfortunately, is why Halo is Microsoft’s worst enemy at times.
posted by Gazunta · at 7:41 pm · filed under Editorials
"But when they do do something stupid like walk directly into the line of fire, run back to their hiding point and then run back out in the open again like they dropped their school bag on a zebra crossing…"
How many squad based game have I played like that. It’s like the darn monkey in B&W you show it how to gather wood.. And then it goes and eats someone, you slap it around a bit and never eats again. Stupid monkey.