The Outfit does have some new gameplay ideas and a foundation for a good story, it falls short to be recommendable.
The game is set in France during WWII, and it is up to “The Outfit,” three bad asses to take down a rogue Nazi general. The three main characters in the story are Deuce Williams, the cigar smoking, pistol wielding leader of the group. Next is J.D. Tyler, who carries a scope rifle and a shotgun. Lastly, there is Tommy Mac, who equips an automatic weapon along with a flamethrower. None of these characters are the least bit interesting. They are all pretty clichéd characters with no personality, no real likeable qualities and no attachment once so ever.
Now, despite the horrible main characters, The Outfit actually features a story that could have been good. It has love interests, revenge, betrayal, feuds, etc. But the story is never really fleshed out that much. You get very quick cut-scenes at the beginning and end of most missions and that’s it. It tries to just throw all these different story elements at the player without any sort of attention to developing the plot lines or making me care about any of the characters. In the end, you’ll end up laughing at just how horrendous the story is.
The presentation in The Outfit isn’t too great. It tries to force this cheesy “badditude” with your kills earning “Field-Units,” which they abbreviate to “FU’s.” The problem with it isn’t that it is there, necessarily, it is just that the characters don’t seem all that bad-ass. Their weapons are extremely underwhelming and inaccurate; also, for someone that is supposed to be heroic, they move incredibly slow and cannot run for more than 15 to 20 seconds at a time, depending on the character you get. They can, however, take a lot of damage, especially from just regular Nazi grunts, before they die. That is about the extent of their “toughness.”
The main attraction on the gameplay is the “Destruction on Demand” feature. Basically, you spend the aforementioned field-units on machine gun nests, anti-air and anti-tank weapons, air strikes, etc., and you can place them in strategic spots where you need some help taking care of the bad guys. The system works quite well and the NPC’s generally do a good job manning the weapons you deploy, and adds a small element of strategy. I do wish, though, they could have made the system on the fly, so you don’t have to stand still to deploy weapons.
One of the major issues in terms of gameplay that I found was that the vehicles were, at times, particularly frustrating to control. The controls were jerky and sometimes the camera would obstruct your view as to which way your vehicle was turned, resulting in going the opposite way you wanted it to. Vehicles are very big part of this game and because they are such a necessary part of the Outfit, the game just tends to get very annoying.
Another issue I found troubling with the gameplay is inaccuracy of the weapons. The reticules for tanks and Deuce’s bazooka are just really awkward. The reticule will turn red, seemingly saying that you are right on, but in reality you’re off by a good margin.
Lastly, this game features some downright unrealistic health for enemy grunts. They aren’t overly difficult, but it takes a good seven to eight rounds to take them down with Tommy Mac’s automatic gun. Also, when you are in a tank or have a bazooka and shoot at these grunts and they all go flying, but only one dies is just terribly unrealistic.
Graphically, The Outfit doesn’t really look all that great. There are a lot of things in the environments, but none of them are too impressive. The character models for the three main characters look alright, but the actual grunts don’t look to great. There isn’t much variation in the death animations and the ones that they do have aren’t terribly satisfying. The explosions look fairly good, though, with freshly smoked tanks, anti-tank weapons, etc., splintering quite well. The Outfit doesn’t look too much better than an Xbox game.
The voice acting in the Outfit is pretty bad. They have two celebrity voice actors, Robert Patrick, the bad guy in Terminator 2, and Ron Perlman, who was Hellboy, and neither of them do a good job. Their dialogue was forced and uninspired. Also, as Ryan Davis mentioned in his review, the French and German accents are awful to the point that it is humorous.
The online in the Outfit is the main attraction for this title, and the multiplayer is actually quite good. It features head-to-head, two-on-two and three-on-three. One of the gameplay types is a Battlefield 2 like system, where both teams start off with 150 “command points” and they go down when you lose control of “strategic objectives.” There are some balancing issues in regards to the maps, but on the whole, the multiplayer is the meat of the game and can be pretty fun, although it still suffers from the same gameplay problems that plagued the single player.
Another thing that The Outfit does really well is in the games achievements. There are two achievements to get in each of the twelve levels in the game, and all of them are somewhat hidden, so you could miss a lot of these achievements if you don’t look out for them. There are 16 online achievements, and some of them range to the very difficult to just playing the game long enough online to reach them. Overall, you still have to work for these achievements, although, on the whole, they aren’t impossible by any stretch of the imagination.
The overall package of the Outfit, though, just doesn’t make sense for Xbox 360 owners to pay for, even at the discounted $39.99 price. The gameplay is severely lacking, the graphics do not showcase what the 360 is capable of and the story, while having the ground work for a solid story, just never pans out. If you’re still not sick of the WWII genre, The Outfit might give you a bit of fun over a weekend.