Brute Force (2003/Xbox)

 

Brute Force is Digital Anvil’s attempt to enter the third person shooter market, and with their elite team of super humans, aliens and cyborg’s they’ve a very good go at it. And I apologies in advance about the many Halo comparisons which you’re about to read, but this game was hyped to be a Halo beater.

 

Graphics (8/10)

 

This games graphics are probably its strongest point, next to maybe its replay value, which I’ll come to later. The visuals in some ways can be compared to Halo’s, well others it doesn’t match up to well. Like its characters they look amazing, but if you get to close you’ll see the tiny sharp edges which Halo did not have. Also the environments are incredible detailed and well designed, those not so well designed that they fell very linear. As well as the environments maybe wonderful, but they are all so very small. A lot of the best level happed in an area no bigger than two football stadiums.  Another thing about the landscapes is there are only around five different versions. There is grassland, moons, lava planets, marshes and wastelands, you may think that Halo had about the same amount of landscapes, but Halo made up for in size and Brute Force can’t compete with that sort of scale.

The characters like I said are well created, but there never seems to be more than ten individual characters on the screen at once. The engines always attacks with two or three enemies at once, only occasional will you fight a lot of enemies.

The main characters movements work well, at least compared to other third person shooter I’ve seen, though some of their movement looks and feels very stale, especially when their walking.

 

Sound (7/10)

 

Sound in every game is important and Brute Force is no different. Each character has there own voice actor, each one filling the roll quite nicely. Though there are a few mistakes in the speech. Some times if a character is killed during the mission you will still hear his or her voice during a cut scene.

The music in Brute Force works a lot like classic Tomb raider style of music, they’ll be a slow song playing in the back ground and when danger starts the music picks ups. Luckily this style of music suits the gameplay, really adding to the feel of the action and situation. The only down side to the music is the fact that isn’t composed for this game, at least not at the level of detail put in to Halo’s sound track.

Another plus for the game is the little details, which is in this case is the fact if you run for a long period of time then when you stop your character will start to pant until they catch their breath. They also pant for longer if they’re carrying large weapons.

Unfortunately a downside of the sound part of this game is the weaponry; there maybe a lot of different types of guns, but they all sound the same. For example there only seems to be one sound effect for machine gun fire, they just fire at a different rate.

Like in most games each variation of alien has the same voice, though in most of Brute Force’s fire fights you’ll never really get a chance to here them.

 

Gameplay (7/10)

 

The main characters consist of Tex, the Berserker. Tex is basically the muscle of the group and is the first the character you get to control. Tex uses only the games large weapon’s, he won’t touch the small weapons, though this isn’t a bad thing. Tex’s special ability is to carry both of his weapons at once; unfortunately you’re not able to do or use things like Med pack and reload with out putting his second weapon away.

The second character that comes under your control is Brutus, an alien assault trooper and that what he does, assault. He is a good combination of power and speed, carrying one large weapon and one smaller weapon. His special ability is called the spirit of Vengar, which makes him stronger and give him his own version of the organic sensor.

The third character you gain is Hawk, a scout. The first female member of your team, she has a special weapon called the power blade, that is really just a light sabre. Her special ability is probably the most useful in the entire game, the power of invisibility. Though its energy bar, which all special abilities have is far too small and goes really quickly.

The final member of your squad is Flint, the cyborg sniper. She always carry’s a sniper rifle and has a special ability to match, auto targeting. It might have a large energy bar, but it’s very inaccurate and for a mechanical shooter, which is very surprising.

The gameplay is pretty standard, with nothing ground breaking and it has a lot of similarities to Halo’s set up. There are some differences, for example there is a Metal Gear Solid style menu, in the bottom right corner, when brought up pauses the game. Also there is a no actually version of the torch as in Halo. Instead you have an organic sensor, which you don’t get until about the fifth level and is completely useless. I say this because this Brute Force doesn’t really have any dark area’s requiring this vision mode. And on another note, in the Brute Force novel the Organic sensor can see through wall and floor, I still have yet to see that happen in this game.

One thing Brute Force does beat Halo in, is it sheer amount of weapons, those this is not necessarily a good thing. Because in Halo each weapon had a purpose and was powerful enough to get you through the entire game, well Brute Force have gone for a more classic shooter set up. The first weapons you get being weak and by the end of the game the weapon you get are stronger. There is nothing wrong with this system really, though a little variation in the type of weapons available would off been nice.

Now we all know Master Chief and his powerful armour, well there is no equillant in Brute Force. In fact in this game the main characters are much easier to injury and a lot faster to die. Though luckily for the players some of the enemies die just as quickly, but there are some bosses. In this sort of game I think the age of end of level bosses is dead. Sure you can have them in genre like platformers or Beat’em-up where the last guy is harder to K.O or kill than the rest, but in this genre it’s just wrong.

 

Story (4/10)

 

The games weakest point is it simple and over used storyline. The story goes Brute Force is a highly trained team brought together to defend the confederation. Unforunletly that is about how deep the story goes, since there are no twists, no surprises which you couldn’t have guessed and the missions are just as bad. Most of the mission consist of either kill someone, find something, one mission is protect some and every mission has a common kill every one goal. Though these missions may appeal to many peoples sense of violence, they are very not very fulfilling, at least until you play the higher differently levels.

 

Replay (7/10)

 

The single player story does have a bit of replay value; its higher level of difficulty will challenge even the most experienced players. Those this works both ways, because the casual gamer won't have the time that is needed to enjoy this game.

The replay part of this game is like on every game, it’s in the multi player modes. There are only two types of multiplayer modes, they’re single player death match, were you control just one character and there is team death match, which is a lot more fun. In this you control a team of your choice, at first you can only get to choose Brute Force, but as you go through the game you pick items called DNA Canisters, these open hidden character in multi player. Those the multi player suffers from the same problem as the single player, small maps and I mean really small maps.

Also another thing I would off thought computer game companies would off caught on to by now is the use of Xbox Live. Brute Force had a massive opportunity to compete on the internet, but there is no online gaming opinion. All there is a few levels to download, which is a shame because if they had of included an online gaming facility then this game would have been much better.

 

Overall (7/10)

 

Brute Force is nothing ground breaking, but it has solid gameplay and graphic and it’s only major let down is it pathetic story line. I suppose if this game had been brought out before Halo it might have been consider a better game, but now its just another example of what too much hype can do to a game.