Brute Force puts you in control of a squad of four soldiers charged with preserving galactic peace. This duty will take you to volcanic, forested, tropical and other planetoids while you battle multiple varieties of enemies. As part of The Confederation, you must ensure that each of your characters uses his or her abilities to take down those enemies appropriately.

By "appropriately," I mean using each member of your squad in the same way as nearly every squad-based shooter: for sniping, for stealth, for heavy gunning and for all-around combat. In theory, it’s not unlike Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon, where you manipulate the controls with ease to play to each soldier’s strength and succeed as a team. In reality, though, the need for such cooperation isn’t nearly as strong in Brute Force, which is a serious disservice to an otherwise excellent game.

Don’t get me wrong: you can make Brute Force as strategic or as straightforward as you like. I’m one of those gamers who like to methodically make my way through a level, cautiously clearing every building and strategically sniping from hilltops. As a result, it took me a while longer to beat the single-player campaign than other DailyGame reviewers. But therein lies the problem: I used each character’s specific abilities whenever strategy called for it, while others didn’t do so nearly as often … yet still beat the game without trouble.

Not until the last two levels of Brute Force do you really need to use your characters as they’re designed. In the game’s first 16 missions, you can pretty much leave Hawk and Flint (your stealth and sniper specialists, respectively), at the beginning of a level and move ahead with your big-hitters, Tex and Brutus. It won’t exactly amount to run-and-gun gameplay, but the "team" aspect isn’t as important as you’ll find in other squad-based games.

Neither is the story as compelling as other team-oriented titles’. Sure, it’s full of political intrigue and save-the-universe drama, but it’s not the compelling thread to connect levels and make the game an edge-of-your-seat experience. Rather than a cohesive story unfolding with each mission, the game feels like its levels have been thrown together (albeit thrown together well) with progressively harder enemies. In a sense, it’s a testament to the gameplay that you want to keep playing, but it’s a simultaneous knock to the story that I can’t tell you what the point of the game was before the second-to-last level.

If you lose a comrade or two in battle, you’ll immediately regain them in the next mission thanks to the wonders of cloning. As you make your way through enemies and objectives, you’ll rack up points/cash that you can use to clone future comrades. Ironically, though, cloning a new character costs you only a handful of points. Had cloning cost more, you’d have been more interested in your teammates’ survival. But alas, clones are cheap, presumably because inflation is non-existent in space. And as a result, your interest will be equally non-existent when it comes to making it out as a cohesive, four-soldier unit.

The lack of a buddy system aside, Brute Force is one helluva shooter. It may not be as tactical or strategic as billed, and the enemy and teammate AI may be spotty at times, but the gameplay is incredibly fun. Control-wise, you’ll be commanding your comrades to fire at will, stand their ground, cover you or move to specific locations within a matter of minutes. That is, of course, unless you’re playing through with a friend, as the game allows you to do. Then all bets are off, unless your friend lets you bark orders like a drill sergeant.

It would’ve been a sin to release Brute Force without cooperative play, so Digital Anvil avoided purgatory by supporting co-op play for up to four unique gamers. This is truly where the game gets fun, and you’ll feel like a sinner yourself for putting down a co-op game in mid-battle, which the game allows you to do. But unless you’re the victim of an incredibly small bladder, you’ll find yourself glued to co-op play as long as your eyes can take it.

Two words: "Bump. Mapping." Brute Force is a sight to behold. From gorgeous character models to real-time shadows to bump-mapped everything, the game is a graphical feast. I’m sure I’ll get hate mail for saying this, but Brute Force is second only to Splinter Cell in terms of graphical quality on Xbox. I find it particularly amazing that the game isn’t 480p (according to the game packaging) yet still has fewer jaggies than any game outside of Battle Engine Aquila. Especially considering all the rounded shapes you’ll encounter in the game. Astonishing.

If there’s an issue with Brute Force graphically, though, it’s that you’ll encounter those rounded shapes and the levels in which they appear over and over. The game’s 18 missions take place on six different locales, but despite the "average" of three visits per location, you only stop once at several of them, leaving you on a few planets more often than you might prefer. Also, unlike many games, which put you on a level for consecutive missions and then remove you from it entirely, Brute Force jumps from planet to planet and back again, which adds to the "thrown together" feel of the plot and exacerbates the sensation that you’re re-visiting locations because of a lack of variety.

The variety in each location is most definitely there, though. In the jungle, you’ll fight through the misty forest floor and wade through swamps, while on the volcanic planet you’ll battle fire-breathing lava "hounds" and watch as cinders gently float from the sky to the ground below. The structures are all appropriate to their respective level as well, and most of them are satisfyingly destructible and/or explosive.

I’ve read several reports of framerate issues, but not once in my single- or multiplayer engagements did I encounter such a problem. I also didn’t find any of the enemies’ character models too bland or derivative, as others have said. A humanoid enemy looks like a humanoid enemy, it’s as simple as that. The armor changes for some classes, and the skin tone and textures change for unique species, but two arms and two legs is standard in my book. What’s there is done very well, and you will most definitely not be disappointed. If only the bodies of fallen enemies didn’t disappear after five seconds, I’d have little to complain about graphically in Brute Force.

Any Xbox shooter worth its salt includes positional audio, and Brute Force does so in all its Dolby Digital glory. There’s nothing like listening to enemies chat just around the corner and having it come out of the correct right-front speaker. Or hearing the thwffft of a sniper bullet breeze past your head and hit the rock over your left shoulder. Even the environmental sounds are an audiophile’s dream, with the gentle ocean waves lapping on the shore behind you and to the right.

The sound effects of your weapons get the job done, but they aren’t quite as individually memorable as other sounds. A Bower shotgun definitely doesn’t sound like a Confed regenerating rifle or a thermal Sweeper (rocket launcher), but it also doesn’t sound quite as realistic as you’d expect from a gun based in reality.

In fact, the most memorable and "realistic" sounding weapon has got to be the Roller, a completely fictional heat-seeking rolling grenade that pings like sonar until it finds an enemy. Seriously, nothing can get your blood racing in a multiplayer game more quickly than hearing the Roller’s ping ping pinging and scrambling to find out where it’s coming from.

The voice acting, as sufficient as it is, is indicative of the game’s uninspiring plot. Each character definitely has his or her own distinct personality that comes through loud and clear in the between-mission cut scenes. It’s just that the actors deliver their lines with so much focus on personality that they forgo any sense of drama to help set the story. In-game lines are equally spotty, and although there was more than one instance where I laughed out loud at an intentionally deadpan conversation, there were also a few instances where I laughed almost as loudly at a line that was (probably) supposed to be completely serious.

As mentioned earlier, multiplayer is truly where it’s at in Brute Force, and replayability is a clear benefactor from this. For starters, the single-player campaign (a misnomer, since you can play it with up to three others) is surprisingly short at about 21 hours, but the Deathmatch options are fun enough to keep the game in your Xbox for months to come. Whether you’re playing a standard Deathmatch game or controlling your own four-man team in Squad Deathmatch, Brute Force is going to keep many a gamer up late at night begging to play "just one more" round.

The multiplayer also benefits from the single-player campaign in that you can unlock 12 additional characters for Deathmatch and Squad Deathmatch. To accomplish this, you need to explore every area of the levels and locate a DNA canister for the respective character, one canister per level with a few repeats thrown in just in case you missed one earlier. I can think of several levels I played through two or three times to find the "necessary" DNA, so it’s a safe bet that these unlockables will keep you playing the single-player game at least until you find all the new characters.

The game’s replayability is also boosted by the fact that you can take control of the various Brute Force squad members by a simple press of the D-pad. Although the most deliberately paced gamers (like myself) will already be prone to switching repeatedly throughout a level, this feature will allow even the most trigger-happy gamers to experiment with other characters once they beat the mission, letting them try their hand at a level multiple times with a different strategy.

The biggest downer in terms of replayability is the game’s lack of Xbox Live multiplayer support. New levels and maps are scheduled for the future, but actual online play is nowhere to be found. Unless you’ve got several friends who can make it to a LAN party, that Ethernet jack just won’t do you any good in the middle of a mission. For a game like Brute Force, this is a true shame, and it’s a detail that thousands of gamers will lament for many months to come.

Brute Force will knock you every which way but loose. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll scream for more and you’ll scream at the lack of a plot. The game’s shortcomings in the squad and story categories are a disappointment, but they don’t even come close to making the game a "mixed bag." Far from it, they knock an excellent game from "Editors Choice" status to "Way Above Average."

Had Brute Force not had such huge expectations to meet, I’m sure it would have impressed even more people than it already does. It wouldn’t have been called a flawless game, but it would’ve earned a place in even more reviewer’s "must have" piles. As it is, I’ll be holding on to Brute Force for a long time, probably until the Xbox 2 rolls around. It won’t find non-stop rotation in my console, but its multiplayer modes will definitely make semi-regular appearances. So far, this is the must-have summer game for Xbox, even with its few glaring omissions.