Found in the Shuffle

With the deluge of games this great industry churns out, I've long since resigned myself to the fact that I can't keep track of every single one from inception to release. Thus I was relatively unacquainted with Brute Force as recently as a week ago, when Raymond asked me to check out an updated version of it. While at first Brute Force seemed to be overly simplistic, further play revealed it to be a fairly interesting squad-based shooter with a lot of potential to entertain and amaze during the long wait for Halo 2. It also stars a frog, which is always a plus.

Brute Force plays like a mix between Halo and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon. The squad-based action of the latter is present, but the game plays at a much faster pace that's more akin to a first-person shooter. If you're curious, see our last preview for more specifics on the basic gameplay and backdrop. Since that piece covers such matters well, I'm going to focus more on my experience actually playing the game.

Training for Trouble

You start the game with Tex, your main character. He's a standard commando-type fellow with one difference: a few really bad one-liners. Somehow I don't think that "Should've eaten your spinach, son" is the most appropriate way to taunt a hostile alien. Aliens don't even eat spinach! For all we know the stuff might be poisonous to them; Digital Anvil's one-liner ratification committee definitely ought to be catching this stuff. And what's with "Who wants some of the same treatment?" The treatment Tex obliquely refers to is cold-blooded murder, and who would want a treatment of that? It's a silly question.

In any case, Tex starts out on a grassy planet with a big gun and a small list of objectives. This serves as a training mission, and teaches you how to move, aim, use items, disarm mines, and do a bunch of other activities that could prove useful for military operatives. It's revealed that the white button activates a character's special ability, and Tex's is the ability to wield two guns at once. Nifty, and very helpful in busy firefights. In a nod to realism, a meter decreases as this is used, but replenishes once he puts one gun away. Actually, I'm not sure how that's a nod to realism at all, and apologize.
Changing weapons -- You can carry two at once.
This first level also gives you a good look at the game engine. It hums along at around 30 frames per second (fps), and the landscape detail seems to be on par with Halo. The player character models (Tex, et all) are fairly detailed, and the enemies a bit less so. They do, however, ragdoll pretty nicely when vanquished, which is very satisfying. (Tires roll down hills, too, in another example of the game's cool physics.) The nicest touch is probably the thousands of transparent particles floating through the air. Hey, if you can't have 60 fps, you can at least have something pretty to look at. Brute Force can definitely be called pretty, especially when using progressive scan.