"Halo Killer." One has to wonder whether those two words scare the living daylights out of any FPS developer when used to describe their titles. The first few times we heard those words, they were used for Tribes: Aerial Assault and TimeSplitters 2, and we were sorely let down. Those were good games, but in no way were they in the league of Halo or most other classic first-person shooters.
Now those terrifying two words have been thrown at Brat Design/CDV’s upcoming title Breed. Being called a Halo Killer can be a tough thing to live up to, but if Breed keeps on the course the developers and publishers have set out for it, they might just pull it off.
Breed takes place in the distant future in a galaxy colonized by humans. Mankind’s outposts suddenly come under attack by "the Breed," a life force bent on the annihilation of all of humanity (sounds a lot like Halo’s Covenant, no?). One not-so-fine day, the Breed begin a systematic campaign to wipe us out, forcing Earth to send fleets into space to protect its young colonies. The Breed are tricky devils though, and soon enough, they’ve snuck around our war machines and have captured most of Earth. The planet’s last hope is the sole surviving battle cruiser, the Darwin, which pulls into orbit and begins disgorging its troops in an attempt to release the Breed’s stranglehold on the homeworld. You take command at this point, choosing drop locations for your troops and controlling those soldiers and their combat vehicles upon landing.
Breed moves beyond the standard FPS with its deep vehicular component. You’ll find yourself in control of tanks, fighters and eight other vehicles as you fight to end the Breed menace. Vehicle control is a bit more realistic than most FPS titles, with stricter physics for fighters and heavy tanks, which means it’s not such an arcadey "pick up and play" experience.
At the beginning of each of Breed’s 20 missions you’ll put together your assault team, consisting of some generically named characters such as "grunt," "sniper" and "heavy gunner." Let’s hope in the final version CDV will give your guys some names; as a game doesn’t feel terribly immersive when you hear "grunt is dead." It ends up feeling like Gauntlet, with "Elf needs food, badly." Just giving these guys real names such as "Corporal Hicks" would boost the realism tenfold and make you actually care about keeping them alive.
Once your assault team has landed, it’s up to you to move the troops around and belt out their marching orders. Similar to the squad-based Tom Clancy games and the recent Brute Force, you can switch through your squad members to play as them, while simultaneously using the intuitive command menu to tell your squad mates to follow, hold their ground, fire at will or one of several other basic commands. The tactical command menu isn’t as deep as that in other squad-based games, but its simplicity is its strength, since Breed is a fast-paced game and spending all day deploying your team to a spread of waypoints would kill the pacing entirely.
Most characters in Breed come with two weapons, much like…Halo. Of course, each character is limited in how much he can carry besides his standard weapon kit, which is nice if you’re one to appreciate some realism in your FPS titles. Judging by the demo, Halo fans may find that the weapons are completely uninspired. While they may look ultra-high-tech (and perhaps a little over the top) they aren’t at all original in look, feel, sound or damage. It’s your standard pistol, sniper rifle, rockets and grenades, which can get a little dull. And rarely do they do much splash or environmental damage, which makes them seem pretty weak and bland.
The sound in Breed is one of the things we can only hope they are working on. The "grizzled Drill Sergeant" sounds like a voice actor who smoked too many cheap cigarettes before showing up to the studio, then sleep-walked through his lines. Characters sound generic, with a very limited vocabulary (the sniper’s cry of "reloading" every few seconds is especially tiresome). Along with the low-grade voice acting, the weapons sound tinny and nondescript, a sniper round sounds like a loud pistol shot, and rockets just make a basic "boom" and completely lack any visceral impact. In most games, when a rocket hits home, you really feel it in your gut. In Breed, it’s just so much audio clipart. But again, the game is still two months away from its scheduled release. There’s time to fix that.
Unlike the so-so sound, the graphics in Breed are shaping up quite nicely, with plenty of details on the uniforms and armor and some decent terrain effects. Characters move fluidly, lighting is pretty sharp, and the shadows look good. The landscapes are too sparse, but again, this is a demo, and not a complete game, so the levels are not 100-percent complete. Draw distance is pretty amazing, with no discernable pop-up, though we did see some crazy clipping problems during gameplay (like the Breed alien who jumped off a tower and sunk into the dirt up to his neck -- while still moving and shooting). Brat is claiming that its custom-built Mercury graphics engine allows up to 200,000 polygons to be drawn on screen at a time, while Breed typically has about 50,000 on screen during gameplay. The engine definitely shows promise if they can remove the clipping issues.
No Halo comparison would be complete without a discussion of the AI, since we all loved the intelligence (or occasional lack thereof) shown by the Covenant’s alien hordes. I can only hope that Breed’s AI was still locked into a basic demo mode, since the AI simply doesn’t even halfway compare to Halo’s. The Breed’s movements are all scripted, they don’t seek cover, and they do dumb things like jump off cliffs in a desperate attempt to hunt you down. Your team isn’t much smarter, regularly running into a spray of fire just to keep up with you. I’ve ducked my current soldier behind cover in a firefight, only to find him running out in the open the minute I switched to another character. Needless to say, the character AI needs a lot of fine-tuning for Breed to be truly tactical.
By far the most concerning example of this lack of any intelligence was watching my squad shoot straight down at the floor of a bridge and run in circles, even though I ordered them to follow me. After a little investigation, I discovered they were trying to shoot a Breed opponent who was, lo and behold, running in his own circles shooting up at the bridge trying to kill my comrades. No matter what command I issued, the squad kept running in circles until I went under the bridge and delivered a round right to the head of the Breed. Then, perfectly content with the situation, my squad finally regrouped on me. As with most of the other issues with Breed, I can only hope the AI bugs will be squashed in the final version.
So far, we’ve only seen the single player side of Breed, though CDV is promising a full multiplayer experience. Early reports from the developers state that Breed will support 16- player Internet and LAN games, with the standard deathmatch, capture the flag and demolition run modes. Rumor has it, the demolition mode will have your team attacking your opponent’s mothership with bomb laden fighters, which should prove to be a lot of fun if it makes it into the final product.
In the end, I’m not quite sure Breed will live up to its "Halo Killer" moniker, but if Brat keeps advancing the game and fixing the bugs, we are going to see one fantastic game when all is said and done. It may not outdo the gaming glory that is Halo, but it looks like it will certainly stand on its own as a possible game of the year. By year’s end, we might all start referring to all the wanna-be tactical first-person shooters that aspire to greatness as "Breed Killers."
