The Outfit First Look
What would happen if Jerry Bruckheimer turned his attention to World War 2? The result would probably not be too much unlike The Outfit, an upcoming WW2 action game for the Xbox 360. The Outfit is technically a third-person, squad-based shooter, but it emphasizes action over realism and is a departure from the spate of WW2 shooters that have been released of late.
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| A hero and his squad. |
In The Outfit you select from one of three different heroes each with their own specialty – JD is a sniper who also carries a shotgun for when things get too close, Deuce is a bazooka-toting specialist who comes in very handy when faced with enemy armor, and Tommy Mac, an all-around super-soldier cut from the same cloth as Sgt. Rock who is pretty handy with a flamethrower when the action gets up close and personal. Choosing your hero is not one of those game-long commitment kind of decisions either. You’ll be able to switch between heroes at set intervals or after you die so that you can always try to bring in the right man for the job. Also worth mentioning is a rather nice feature of the game that comes into play when you lose your hero. The Outfit will not force you to return to the beginning of a mission or force you to reload your game. Instead you’ll be able to rejoin the action – action which hasn’t bothered to pause or miss a beat simply because you bought the farm.
Your hero will be accompanied by a squad of three supporting soldiers, but they’re just there for a little extra firepower. There’s a rudimentary order system in place that includes assault and suppression style orders, with each hero getting a bonus squad command such as launching a barrage of sticky bombs. However, the developers don’t want you to spend too much time worrying about what to tell your squad to do because they’d rather you have fun blasting the heck out of hordes of Nazis.
The mission demoed at THQ’s Summer Games Day emphasized the chaotic and exciting nature of the game. You must lead your squad on an assault of a French village in Normandy and the Germans would prefer not to leave and as soon as the level opens the action gets hot and heavy. German machine gun nests line the streets, snipers take shots at you from building windows, and to make matters worse you’ll have to deal with enemy armor and the occasional air or artillery strike. Adding to the bedlam is the fact that The Outfit features a full destructible environment – walls come tumbling down, buildings get pounded into rubble, and even church steeples can crash down into the street. If you had the patience and firepower, you could completely flatten each of the game’s levels. Now that’s what I call a fully destructible environment!
Not only is the environment destructible it is interactive as well. Take out a machine gun nest and you can man the weapon yourself and you can hijack enemy vehicles and attack the enemy (or simply run them over) with their own weapons. Just make sure that you’re careful with your own weapons and armor, though, or you may find yourself staring down the barrel of a Sherman tank.
