Breed Updated Impressions

The future is a very dangerous place, if all alien invasions in sci-fi games are any indication. Brat Designs' Breed takes place in a far-future setting after the human forces' flagship, the USC Darwin, returns from a far-off war to find that the aliens have already set up shop on Earth. Naturally, the Darwin's stalwart forces undertake a heroic mission to undermine the alien occupation and locate a human resistance movement that can provide invaluable aid. Over the course of 18 missions, Breed combines a variety of action elements, including squad-based infantry assaults, solo infiltration missions, tank attacks, and strikes using fighters that are equally at home in space as in the air.

We've had the chance to play a new beta version of the game that includes seven of the game's core missions and the two tutorials. While missions we'd seen in a previous version of the game were only subtly different, the additional missions provided a glimpse at the variety the final game should offer. As previously mentioned, Breed's engine is capable of rendering huge outdoor environments and of transitioning between the space environment where the USC Darwin operates and the planet below. At moments, the sheer scale of the environments can help make the missions seem more momentous, and the wide-open missions are often designed to let you pick your path.

While the game often puts you in charge of a small squad of soldiers that you can jump between and issue simple orders to, one of the new missions has you working completely alone as a sniper dropped deep into enemy territory. The sniper rifle has a very high-powered zoom, and you can use it to see incredibly far and pick off very distant targets. In fact, it's often essential to use this weapon to take out the gunners manning distant energy-based artillery. But this stealth mission is particularly challenging due to the huge numbers of Breed soldiers that can appear if you don't take out the scouts early enough to keep them from sounding the alarm. Since you must infiltrate the base through the main entrance in this mission, it seems impossible to avoid detection, but fortunately the sniper also carries a zoom-equipped submachine gun that can handily take down crowds of enemies.

The action gets more explosive in another mission that puts you in the driver's seat of a futuristic tank, which has not only a main cannon and minigun on the turret for you to control, but also guided missiles and two AI-controlled machine guns. You'll mow down hordes of ordinary Breed soldiers on the way to assaulting some antiair defenses, but the enemy tanks and fighters can pose more of a challenge, particularly since there's no way to repair your tank. It's in the tank missions that Breed's destructible objects are seen to best effect. Although only certain specific objects can be destroyed, it's fairly impressive to see a guard tower fly apart in the middle of a fierce tank battle.

The huge size of the game's environments is best appreciated from the air, and we were able to play several aerial missions with two of the human air vehicles: an attack fighter and a well-armed dropship. The fighter can be equipped with a range of weaponry that includes ordinary and guided rockets, smart bombs, and a minigun, and it also has the ability to switch the engines to a VTOL mode to let you hover in place. The same simple interface is used for ground and air operations, and it mostly works well, but it can be difficult to see enemy fighters on the 2D minimap, especially in space.

Breed received a lot of early attention for its visual resemblance to Halo, but the game's robust use of vehicles throughout entire missions is its most obvious appeal. Breed is currently in the beta stage of development and is scheduled to ship this September.