The outfit: hands on

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IGN got to play a little single player of the upcoming 360 game. Here's what they think:

August 25, 2005 - With only a few months left to go before the launch of the Xbox 360, you'd think we'd be knee-deep in new information about the early line-up. Unfortunately, you'd be wrong. The sad truth is that Microsoft and other X360 publishers are still keeping quiet about most of their next-gen titles at this point, and since E3, for the most part it's been 360 degrees of quietude. There are a few rays of light that have escaped the information black hole, though. One of those rays is Relic's The Outfit, being published by THQ. Although we hadn't seen anything of the game since our massive E3 preview, we had a chance to see a more recent build of The Outfit at the German Games Convention, complete with a first look at the single-player portion of the game.


In The Outfit, you can play as one of three characters. Tommy Mac, voiced by Ron Pearlman, is the heavy weapons expert, and can handle armaments such as the heavy machine gun and the ever-satisfying flame thrower. J.D. Tyler is good for both long-range and short-range attacks as he specializes in sniper weapons and hand-to-hand combat. Deuce Williams, voiced by Robert Patrick, is an anti-tank soldier who likes to take the boom-boom to the opposition. While you can't change your character at will, you do get to pick who you want to begin each of the 12 single-player missions, and you can switch when your main character dies, so death doesn't mean the end of it all.
While Relic is best known for their PC RTS games, The Outfit is pretty much a gritty, balls-out action game set in Europe during World War II. There are a few RTS elements, which we'll get into in a bit, but for the most part it's run and gun and gun and gun. Because The Outfit focuses on military action, firepower, as well as thousands of bullets, play a big role in the game. Luckily, instead of running out of ammo, guns just overheat. It's not so bad for most types of guns -- you just can't shoot for a while -- but if you overuse the flame thrower when it's hot, bad, bad things are bound to happen, especially to your hands, face and any other bits of exposed flesh.


While bullets are plentiful, The Outfit isn't just a "you against the world" kind of game. You're in control of a squad of up to five Allied soldiers, and you can issue them simple commands such as attack, take cover or retreat. The squad control reminds me a lot of Freedom Fighters, a terrific yet underrated Xbox game in my opinion. Seeing as how war is hell, your squad members probably won't last for long, but you can recruit other available units that you run across during each mission. However, even if you can't find any reinforcements on the ground, you can always buy them using action points and they'll air drop in to your position....

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