Alright! So last week kicked off my journey into digging through my backlog and beating as many Xbox 360 games as I could before the year’s end. With my new (and likely final 360) controller, Harvey, in hand I sent out to do just that starting with The Outfit. Released in 2006, The Outfit was one of the games created by PC veteran Relic to be created for consoles and was one of the first games to arrive on the 360 during the very year that the Sony PS3 and Nintendo Wii would make their debuts . As one of the titles released a few months after the initial wave of launch titles The Outfit was intended to be one of the first of many to serve as an example for the potential of then-next generation console gaming in 2006 coinciding with the offerings  the other two console makers would release later that year. Unfortunately it would go down as a mediocre release back in its day, but that was then. Years later I can’t help but wonder how much The Outfit aged since then, and if time (and a massive price drop decrease to the single digits) would make this cursory expedition through the game worth the trouble. Well one picture can probably sum up the experience…

“Ugh!” is just about right on the mark.

No Fine Wine

The Outfit is certainly no buried treasure, and time most certainly cannot create an excuse for what seems to be one hell of a terribly made game. From the get go the visuals for the game, even for an early Xbox 360 game, are incredibly subpar with poor textures doing no favors to the environment or for characters. When considering launch title games like Peter Jackson’s King Kong and Call of Duty 2 it seems like The Outfit took a step back to original Xbox quality in terms of visuals. In many ways, thanks in part to Relic’s hand in creating Company of Heroes, the visuals of The Outfit feel a lot like playing one of their RTS games zoomed in at about low graphical settings.

Looks just like the bastard child of Company of Heroes

Of course it’s not all about graphics. Gameplay is the core aspect to many a game, but that front fares similarly…

One Bad Company

The core aspect of The Outfit centers around being able to buy units in the field to support your attacks and defend territory you’ve captured. In theory this mechanic should provide for  stirring strategic combat, but level design boils down to relentlessly (and rather dully) advancing from point A to point B with the game holding your hand every step of the way by reminding you what strategic points to get despite them being unmissable due to the incredibly linear path, and when to defend said points which completely nullify any sense of strategic action.

Bunker down for 11 more linear paths just like this!

Worse still is the absolutely horrible unresponsiveness that comes about from controlling your player character. There are three player characters to choose from with their own uniquely ineffective weapon sets for battling on foot from sniper, anti-tank, and close quarters machine gun but all three suffer from incredibly inaccurate aim and non-existent firepower save for the anti-tank rockets. Even with upgrades that come with natural progression throughout the campaign the sheer lack of bite while on-foot makes vehicular use a necessity.

Of course, vehicles too also suffer from the same unresponsiveness of movement control, but are at least fitted out with more effective armor and firepower (though it is highly inaccurate) to blitz your way to the end point of a level. Still, it’s just not fun or satisfying, and most of the time is spent simply spamming the construction of tanks (which have the worst handling) as you single-handedly advance through the levels one tank at a time.

And make no mistake there will be a lot of death for your player character and a lot of vehicles that will need to be replaced, not because of intelligent AI, but because the sheer swarm of them combined with your inability to effectively take them out on foot (due to weak inaccurate weapons) or efficiently in a vehicle (due to severe inaccuracy and unresponsive imprecise movement) just serve to bog you down more than really throw you a proper challenge. Luckily there’s no penalty for dying as death merely gives the ability to choose a different player class and just respawn. However, to reiterate all it does is make it feels like the whole process is one giant bog to slowly slosh through monotonously.

As for the story, the narrative feels awkwardly disjointed and generic, and that’s saying a lot from a game made in an era where WWII stories have yet to truly saturate the market. By today’s standards it’s even worse when stacked up to the many war stories found in video games today for gamers such as myself who decide to play through it at this point. All the usual cliches are here from the gruff ranking captain, dashing young soldier out to woo the foreign women (voiced by Ron Pearlman no less), and dastardly evil made-up Nazis leaders that need to be hunted down. It isn’t anything new, and after trudging through each monotonous level the story bits hardly seem like an entertaining reprieve.

Let the Dead Rest

Overall, The Outfit is a particularly painful experience in knowing what didn’t work for an early Xbox 360 title. Production values seemed low on the presentation end with gameplay also suffering from a lack of polish which is a shame because the premise of a fast pace war-game riding on a player’s tactical ability to call in units in a sort of quasi-RTS style sounds interesting on paper, but the execution against AI in the single player campaign just falls flat.

Perhaps at one point that premise was fully realized back during its prime with Xbox Live multiplayer support where real human players were pitted against each other, but alas the multiplayer community is effectively dead and there’s no chance of finding a match out there to see how the game design fares online. Also of note is the fact that roughly half of the game’s achievements are online-only so those achievement hunters hoping to complete another game in their collection should be weary of the inability to do so at this point.

Despite the novelty of seeing an early Xbox 360 game in action as well as it’s cheap used price of about $ 5.00 USD at Gamestop, the sheer tedium of the experience just isn’t worth even that cost of admission or time unless you happen to already be stuck with untouched copy of the game and have nothing else to do. In the current state it’s in today I give The Outfit an interest level of:

 2 Out of 5*

Due to  imprecise gameplay mechanics and no single player replay value combined with  a dead multiplayer community

*Note: Review scores for all “Backlog Reviews” are based on the gameplay/price/replayability appeal in addition to single player/multiplayer DLC value in its current state