The next Halo, they said. I say, the next major disappointment, and not worth your time or money...
User Rating: 5.7 | Brute Force XBOX
Brute Force was touted as the next Halo as it was being released, and it's presales even exceeded Halo's. Unfortunately, despite delays and an already long development time, Brute Force fails to deliver in some way, shape, or form on almost all fronts. So what exactly went wrong? Anybody who has seen a trailer can tell you that the squad based tactical action seems to be done flawlessly, and the graphics and sound all seem right on. But it's not so; somewhere along the line the developers seemed to have forgotten about the team play aspect of the game, and a simple straight-forward shooter was released. That brings up a new question, do I review this game as it was meant to be, a squad based tactical shooter, or as it is, a very simple, straight-forward shooter? Let's touch up on a few other things, first. Brute Force, simply put, is beautiful at first glance. In some areas the sheer amount of detail will shock and amaze even a die-hard Xbox gamer. Character animations are, for the most part, excellent; textures and bump-mapping give the scenery, ground, and everything in-between a very realistic look; and the cutscenes are awesome. There is plant life on the ground and particles just randomly floating in the air in some areas, and it's simply beautiful. There are really only two things to even begin to complain about, and one is the somewhat frequent and sudden framerate drops when there is a lot of action in some of the more detailed areas. The other is the fact that the same six environments appear over and over, and while they don't have the exact same level design, they all feel similar enough that you'll feel like you've been there before. The controls come next as far as quality, but they don't turn out to be nearly as good as they should. The game is played from the 3rd person, which is fine and all, because it still plays like it's first person. While not necessarily bad, it's really truly hard to point out anything that's really that good, either, so I'll just pick out some complaints, instead. First of all, some functions just take too long or aren't needed, and never get used. For example, I never found one instance where it was crucial for me to jump anywhere, yet there's a button for it. Throwing the under powered but cool looking grenades takes time, as you have to build up you're throw meter, which helps you tell how far you're going to throw it. In the heat of battle, it's never used. Aiming is fairly tough as some of the AI jumps about, and the auto-aim really doesn't help that situation out at all. Even when the targeting reticule on the screen turns red, actually hitting the enemy is never guaranteed. It's hard to say anything good about the music or sound effects in Brute Force. Obviously, sound effects and the like should be something very sci-fi, and while this is sort of accomplished, it's also sort of annoying. Gun fire is thoroughly unimpressive and puny, and the sound of characters gets old fast. Chatter from your team and the other various creatures you'll end up killing is repeated often enough to drown out the fact that at first they're alright, although during cinematics the voice overs are pretty well done. The music is a sort of a soothing sci-fi drone to a sudden, horrible sounding hard-rock hair band type of music. To sum up the audio in Brute Force I've got one thing to say: annoying. I also want to quickly touch up on the multiplayer aspect of Brute Force. In a word: lame. The more players you have on the screen, the less you can see around you due to the 3rd person view. Because the computer AI is quite possibly better than a human player, it's actually easier to play this game without your friends. Other multiplayer modes such as deathmatch are extremely lacking as well, as they lack bots, large maps, and enough players to make it any fun. Oh, and put your Xbox Live kit away, as this game doesn't support anything except content download, and I've yet to see anything. Finally, there's the whole story/gameplay element. The story is crap, to put it simply. You go from planet to planet trying to take out certain people who you think is important in some way or another as you unravel some mysterious plan to blow something up or a universal take-over or... ah, who cares, it sucked. The gameplay is really a mixed bag as I've said before. Brute Force is supposed to be a tactical shooter; imagine Rainbow Six in the future, but it never turns out that way. There are four playable characters, Tex, Brutus, Hawk, and Flint, who are the two gun-toters, the stealthy assassin, and the sniper, respectively. The each have individual and very useful traits, but unfortunately, none of them really get to be used the way they really should. I found that Flint works better as a run and gun shooter than Brutus ever did, and Hawk's stealth just doesn't last nearly long enough and takes too long to recharge for it to be any good more than one or two times in an entire level. Enemy AI can see anybody from all the way across a level as well, making true sniping or hiding impossible anyways. Never once did I use the team as trailers show them being used, and trust me, I tried. After a few levels a realization hits the player that this game isn't what it's supposed to be, not even close. Instead, the game makes the player take their squad from point A to point B in a valley while simply killing everything in sight. Personally, I was not only disappointed by this, I felt as though I was ripped off in some way or another. I can honestly give this game no slack. The only thing that I'm going to say that is truly worth noting is the graphics, and there's issues even there. The controls have holes, the audio is annoying, the story is lame as hell, and the gameplay, in my personal opinion, is horrible. Maybe I'm being harsh in giving this game the score that I'm going to give it, but I have not felt so completely disappointed and angry at a game that looked so promising. Finally, I cannot recommend this game to anybody looking for what this game promises, and will also go so far as to say that if it's a simple shooter you're looking for, look elsewhere. 
