In the beginning, The Outfit was interesting to play, but it never expands on that and just falls flat at the end.
It really isn’t
It’s a shame too because the game had promise. As I’ve stated, the story takes place in France during World War II. This game isn’t factual by any means like games such as Call of Duty or Medal of Honor claim to be. However, t he story is fairly interesting; atrocities, betrayal, heroism, a little romance and good old fashioned American bravado are the general tones of this game. Unfortunately the game doesn’t tread on any new grounds and relies on average story telling and poor dialogue to get its point across during cutscenes.
As for the gameplay category, for some strange reason the developers thought it would be a good idea to let you die as many times as you want without any penalty. This destroys any form of strategy needed in the game because you can just keep rushing the Nazis until you succeed. Sure that may take a while but by the end of the game, you’ll probably be tired of playing it like I was. The game plays out pretty much the same way through each level. Capturing strategic places is the order of the day in this game. A motor pool, the armory and the radio tower will allow you to call upon vehicles, artillery and air strikes respectively and capturing checkpoints will help you along the way. The game does throw in a little of variety in side missions that unlock achievements and every once in a while you have to defend places but even these are overused and become the norm.
I did mention that the strategy portion is deluded because of the infinite lives but that’s only half of it. The AI on the enemy only knows two tactics; rush and retreat. Tanks will rush all the time and when the damage gets too much for the crew to handle, they bail and retreat for cover. Foes will stay in machine gun nests until they are either flanked or they’re dead. Foot soldiers only rush when there’s a group of them together
The game hands out a decent amount of vehicles and weapons to destroy the Nazis. From machine gun toting jeeps, machine gun nests, anti-tank guns and tanks themselves, there’s always a way to effectively destroy your enemy. Actually I should take out the word “effectively” because all weapons feel very underpowered in this game. Unless you score a direct hit with a tank shell, you can expect a Nazi soldier to flop around the landscape 2-4 times before doing you the favor of dying. The .50 cal bullets are equally ineffective, being just eaten up like pac pellets by the soldiers and tank battles can last 8-9 volleys before a side is destroyed.
The Havok physics engine is displayed on the case but doesn’t look like it was effectively used at all. Dying soldiers appear to be scripted to die in a certain way, whether they are gunned down or blown up. The vehicles do display some sort of physics although it’s not as perfect as I’d like it to be. Vehicles can shrug of tank shots that tilt them to a side and keep driving like it was just a speed bump. In fact, debris is the only thing that looks like it’s genuinely effected by gravity. The graphics during cutscenes look like high resolution Xbox graphic but the actual gameplay looks pretty good through out. There was some slowdown on the later levels for no apparent reason and now that I think about it, the collision detection was a little unforgiving. You could strafe away from the side of a building to get a clear shot at your enemy but chances are, unless you were a good 10’ away from the building, your bullets would hit an invisible barrier. In the end the game had a lot of promise to it. A friend and I spent a few hours testing out the different strategies and was surprised at the amount of depth and tactics one could use to kill the other person. Unfortunately it’s ruined by poor AI, feeble weapons and unlimited lives. In the beginning, The Outfit was interesting to play, but it never expands on that and just falls flat at the end.