The Outfit Review by The Game Reviews

The Outfit Review
by xTheGunslingerx

One of the most original WWII shooters available on the Xbox 360 console to date The Outfit delivers a new blend of game play and action. Sadly this game is easily outshined by graphic monuments and more recent titles such as Lost Planet and Gears of War. Do not confuse this game for your typical 3rd person shooter though. The Outfit although played in third person relates a lot more to a real time strategy. In a group of hot headed red-blooded Americans, you will take on the role of various protagonists, depending on which weapon kit you would like to use. The farm-boy ladies man “Mac”, New Yorker tracker and hunter “J.D. Tyler”, rough, tough, “Cpt. Deuce”, and the sympathetic “Hans Von Beck”; trek through the desperate German forces, going up against impossible odds to reach General Viktor Morder, drawing on the final steps to end the war. The presentation is really basic and an easy concept to understand. The player selects a character at the start of each mission. Each character will have exclusive weapon kits, so who you choose should be outfitted best for the environment you are going into. In the game (campaign or multiplayer), the click of one button opens up a mini-menu.; from this menu you select vehicles, emplacements, men, or air strikes you’d like to “call” in. From clicking one of those you then select the exact emplacement/vehicle you want. Each kill, vehicle, or emplacement you remove rewards you points which you then use to call in items of your own. The presentation is the same in both campaign and multiplayer making the two zones a flawless transaction between play. Overall achieving a basic presentation with many possibilities.

The graphics are now below par. Well comparing best with Oblivion and Perfect Dark Zero, The Outfit shares the same “glossy polish” on objects, environments and people. Overall the environments are large polished, and although some aspects could say “lightly cartoonish”, it still realistic in presentation. I would have to pull on the design concept of Crackdown to truly stress the definition of lightly cartoonish. The water and mountains are very well designed; and appear most realistic in the game. While the environments do vary, basic terrain is often repeated and over used through out the campaign and multiplayer levels, making most scenarios familiar and underdeveloped. Characters are much more details. The main protagonists and villains are deeply designed, and some to reflect the actors which portray them. Such as Robert Patrick who plays the voice of Deuce Williams, appearing nearly exactly as he does in the film Terminator 2 as the “T-1000”, those mirrored lenses are really becoming his trade mark. On to videos. The cinematics use the same graphics engine as the in game play allows. So cinemtaics are not made in high-definition pre-rendered quality, they are still developed with much more attention to detail while maintaining the games simplistic design scheme. Nothing breath-taking or over amazing but still well done for what it was trying to accomplish. The game was not created to be “serious” or “inspirational as most WWII games aim to reflect the exact events of WWII; which then stresses the game play to be as realistic as is possible. The graphics over all really reflect the light hearted and battle frenzy nature of the games presentation.

The way a war should be

Sound is about average. If you have at least 5.1 surround sound, you’ll really feel as though you’re in the heat of battle. Even without SS the sound is still realistically applied. Each gun, each vehicle, each weapon has a distinct and familiar sound to it. As you are playing through the game you are likely calling in a lot of emplacements. Soon the sound of a Panzerfaust, is smothered by the blazing barrels of half a dozen 40 mm gun nest. As it rightly should be, the heat of battle is a nest of angry wasps, and this game delivers the accurate sounds effects to relate to this. Halfway across a map you can prepare yourself to take on a huge tank from the distinct sounds of the Calliopes rapid firing rocket rack, and the daunting signal of death this sound will instill if you only have 4 squad mates, and a sniper rifle. Mediocre actors deliver an equally average voice over for the games characters. With Robert Patrick, and Ron Perlman presenting the strongest and most accurate vocals to their characters.