Solid game despite a few flaws.
I have to say I was disappointed upon playing this game for the first time. I had waited for it to come out for more than a year and had built up pretty high expectations. But after unlocking the four playable characters and running through the first few missions, I feel that Brute Force's solid gameplay firmly overcomes its flaws.
The third-person perspective was awkward for me at first. It's not quite as smoothly implemented as in Splinter Cell, but it is quite good and just takes a little getting used to. It is easy and intuitive to issue commands to your squadmates, though I wish there was a way to give a single command to the entire squad rather than separately tell each one.
The graphics are largely excellent. Much effort has been put into the textures of rocks, trees and ground. The settings and landscape are gorgeous. The skies are expansive and colorful. But the overall feeling comes up a bit short. Some of the level design -- like the volcanic planet -- is haphazard, with structures and objects placed seemingly at random. On the other extreme, one Earth-like planet with a beach and grassy hills was incredibly beautiful and fun.
The characters have a good variety of abilities. I found myself constantly switching between them to try out different modes of attack. So far I haven't found any one character to be better in all situations.
I am a competent but not PLG (Professional Level Gamer) , and I found the situations to be challenging, often requiring me to replay them a few times to get through. But so far the game hasn't pushed me into hair-pulling frustruation (like Psi-Ops). The most difficult parts come when the enemy has sheer numbers in their favor. The enemy AI is average, maybe a bit below the Halo AI. Your squad AI is a bit better, but I wish the AI-controlled players would at least be smart enough to take a medkit when their health gets below a certain point. It can be frustruating to have to pause in the middle of an intense firefight to tell a wounded comrade to heal themselves.
I did take the opportunity to wander around a couple of the multiplayer arenas. The split screen action does cut down on your viewable area a bit, like all multiplayer games, but the arenas seem expansive and well-done.
One small gripe is the sound. Some of the weapons sound pretty generic, particularly the energy weapons, which discharge with sort of a stereotypical "pfweet! pfweet!"
I think the only other flaws would be the fact that when you are controlling all of the different characters, the game can slow down a bit and you might get stuck on a couple invisible walls.
Overall, Brute Force is a good game. While it arguably would have been better as a first-person shooter, there is nothing inherently wrong with the third-person perspective and it gives the Xbox library a bit of depth to have something like this rather than yet another Halo-Rainbow Six-Wolfenstein-Call of Duty style title.