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The Outfit Review

Jon Wilcox

20/03/2006

Relic Entertainment goes to war in this all-destructible WWII Xbox 360 title...

For developers Relic Entertainment, 2006 is a year that revolves around World War II thanks to their PC RTS title Company of Heroes and third-person shooter The Outfit for Xbox 360. But despite using the same war for both titles, each has its own take on the battles between Allied and Axis troops in the early 1940s. Taking place in the bloody battlefields of France, The Outfit is a wholly destructible gameworld that sees players take control of one of three larger-than-life soldiers each with their own specialist weapons and skills through a dozen single-player missions in an attempt to rid the country of the Nazi onslaught.

Beginning with a standard tutorial that explains the structure of the game, it doesn't take long to realise that despite the different environments, the gameplay of The Outfit is rigid and repetitive. The first half hour of play is the epitome of a destructive playground where anything and everything can succumb to a barrage of fire, but sustaining such a level was always going to be difficult and it's then that The Outfit degenerates into a repetitive experience. Similar to Star Wars: Battlefront, the closed environments in The Outfit are dotted with several positions that can be won and lost by either side. Capturing these is key to progressing through the game; three in particular (the Motor Pool, the Armoury, and the Radio Post) are vital to capture since they allow players to buy reinforcements from The Outfit's trademark 'Destruction on Demand' feature. The fourth type of positions is the Strategic Command posts, which when captured, act as respawn points for players when they die.

On face value The Outfit seems to be very similar to Pandemic's Mercenaries; players can rampage through the environments of Northern France, demolishing the walls, houses, and trees as they go with an array of vehicles and heavy weaponry at their fingertips. This dial-like Destruction on Demand feature, which allows players to call for reinforcements in the form of extra soldiers, machine gun nests, 4x4s, trucks, tanks, and even airstrikes, provides players with the instant firepower needed to win the war, but only if they've captured the relevant posts. For instance, capturing the Radio Post allows players to call for airstrikes, which are handy for destroying particularly tough opponents or heavy placements such as bridges. Once captured however, the enemy can always stage an attempted counter-strike, which would eliminate the player's ability to call for a particular reinforcement, so protecting the three positions plays a very important part in the game.

Padding out each of the missions are side-objectives, allowing players the chance to win medals and Xbox 360 Achievements. Whilst there's some variety in their nature, for instance players may be required to save a certain number of Allied paratroopers that have fallen behind enemy lines, or secure a number of farms in an area, there's no real depth to them. They are just there to fill the amount of time a gamer spends on a mission; especially players who want to raise their Xbox Live Gamerscore.

Each reinforcement comes at a cost however, and in The Outfit the currency is the Field Unit (or FU - pun more than likely intended), which are earned by destroying opponents. As well as spending the FUs on reinforcements, players can also use them to repair damaged vehicles. It's worth noting that unless players are dying on a regular basis there's very rarely a situation in the single-player campaign where they'll find themselves lacking the required number of FUs to buy things, especially when waves of Germans continue to appear. Because of that, The Outfit does get bogged down in endless charges by the player, compounding the repetitiveness of the gameplay.

Although a level of strategy has been implemented into The Outfit, it's by no means a tactically minded game. Players will get used to reinforcing the three key positions with machine gun nests and anti-tank cannons very quickly in the game, whilst it seems that as soon as tanks can be bought the experience becomes nothing more than a war of attrition. There's no real notion of gameover in The Outfit either since players respawn a few seconds after dying, which further adds to the inevitability that given time any mission can be won. That there's no limit to the number of times players can die also strengthens the true nature of The Outfit as a multiplayer online title.

Visually stylised, The Outfit is very arcade-like both in terms of gameplay and appearance. The characters that make up the elite team are larger than life caricatures of the general perception towards US military personnel, which creates a level of humour around them. The unlimited number of lives given to the player creates a certain gung-ho attitude in the way that players are expected to carry out the missions, which reinforces the caricatures and their 'get-the-job-done' mind-set. All three have their own specialisms whether that's Duece's bazooka or Tommy Mac's flamethrower, and all have their unique squad commands for their infantrymen. Despite JD's ability to order an assault on a vehicle or Tommy Mac's ability to order a tear gas attack however, there's rarely a strong enough reason for players to really use them in the field of play. For the most part players will just use the vehicles and each of The Outfit's weapons to proceed through a mission rather than make good use of the command system. Of negligible use in the single-player, the squad command system becomes of even less use in the multiplayer.

Though there's a storyline throughout the single-player campaign, the experience does feel fractured and rarely flows well, which can be attributed to the repetitive gameplay throughout The Outfit. It's not difficult to break the game down into its most basic parts, but each mission essentially sees players try to capture the key positions in a linear gameworld and destroy the Nazis standing in their way. Of course there's a lot of demolition in the process, but at its heart, the game runs for a dozen missions of exactly that structure. For that reason, it's quite difficult to play The Outfit for hours at a time, and the game certainly seems to lend itself to short sharp bursts of play time, especially on Xbox Live. It's a game that neither enjoys the open world design or rivalries of Mercenaries, but is none the less fun in short bursts, especially its online options.

Away from the single-player campaign, which won't take too long to complete by anyone's standards, The Outfit also features a number of multiplayer options, which prove to be a more fun experience. Besides the option to complete the campaign co-operatively, which immediately lifts the gameplay, players can also take part in solo and team gametypes across a dozen multiplayer maps including a V1 Rocket site, a German war factory in the Ruhr Valley, and farmland in the heart of Normandy. A variety of scales together with the obvious differences in locations, the online modes feel more playable especially during quick pick-up-and-play battles. The three gametypes of The Outfit multiplayer includes its own version of Deathmatch (where players record points by killing the player controlled character and not the NPC soldiers), Destruction (which sees players fight in a timed battle where the side with the most units at the end wins), and Strategic Victory (which pits players on a winner takes all experience with the goal being to capture the strategic command points to win) and as with the main game, controlling the key positions is vital to win any game in the multiplayer options. Despite The Outfit's improved playability online, it still suffers from the same level of repetitiveness as its single-player side, it's just that playing the game in shorter bursts online seems more justifiable.

Whilst it's true that The Outfit wouldn't be possible on the current-generation consoles, it also doesn't hit the mark as a full next-gen title either. It's another one of those Xbox 1.5 games that seem to keep cropping up. There's no doubt that The Outfit could only be done on Xbox 360 with the standard of physics beyond any of the current-generation of consoles, but the quality of the physics doesn't impact on the gameplay as perhaps it could. One the whole there's very little in terms of originality in The Outfit since it borrows elements from a number of current-gen titles, with Pandemic's Mercenaries the most obvious, especially in regard to the destruction and damage in the game.