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Review:

16th May 2004:
Breed
Alien butts need to be informed that they are no longer welcome. Congratulations soldier we have selected your foot to do the kicking.
Posted by Chris Snook - PC -

Breed is the squad based tactical shooter published by CDV and is a game that has been on my radar for a long time. It is also a game that has a fair bit of baggage that has been attached to it over the last few months online, be it accurate or not.

Set in the future, Earth has been waging war in the outer reaches of space against the Breed on the last of the Human Battleships - the Darwin. Now after many months of combat the Darwin returns home to find that what they thought was the war was nothing but the diversion and that the Breed are already home, with their feet up and waiting for anyone to come and take the place back. With that it is up to you to punt their alien ass back to where they came from.

First impressions is just how good things look, how smooth transitions from orbit to the atmosphere is and how slick the landings are. There are reflections, light halo's and lens flares, water looks very nice as does nearly everything else. Vehicles especially look as they could indeed be in six hundred or so years, things are not too flashy but strike a good balance between aesthetics and frame rate. Sound also is very good, effects sound as they should do, the music adds to the game's feel and the voices, whilst some are a tad strange at first work and do not detract from everything else.

The controls are also done in a pleasing and easy to fathom manner, the defaults will suit a variety of people's tastes and can be easily reconfigured to however they wish. They generally work as expected with the only sore spot with them appearing in the way the vehicles behave with the fighter providing some of the most annoying aspects.

There is also a wide variety of those vehicles, drop ships, tanks, fighters humvee's and more. There are plenty of weapons lying around both yours and the Breed's and a number of your team are specialists in one weapon or another. Be they snipers or support weapons, they do add to the games feeling of tactical play.

However nearly everything is downhill from here.

The largest problem area is the AI. Admittedly one of the biggest and most difficult coding tasks that can be undertaken, rightly so as it can make or break a game. Simply put your squad-mates are dumb. They fail to pick up ammo on their own, forcing you to hot swap to them to do so. The specialists, all prefer to use their designated weapon. The sniper uses his rifle in close quarters, even when he has an assault rifle with five-hundred rounds available, they even swap back when you switch to them and manually use the assault rifle. Same for the heavy weapons guy. Frustrating. Even more so when they call out they are bleeding and need a medic, this is despite having a number of med-packs that they could have used.

Enemy AI also seems once in a while to be prescient, knowing where you are despite maintains blocking line of sight or being so far away that they are not visible in the sniper scope, nice touch though that the breed sniper rifle is only an 8x scope compared to your own 12x, so there is no real comparison with that they can hit you from seemingly impossible locations.

Clipping is another sticking point. At times it is simply awful. Dropped weapons can fall into terrain, trees and become unable to be picked up once again because they are effectively unreachable. That you can crawl under a tank, get stuck halfway and then find that you cannot crawl back out is another excellent example. Add in the seeming ability to fire through the terrain and score kills on people that are not visible and there is a feeling of unreality setting in. This is a shame as the levels are well thought out at times, with multiple potential paths to success but again let down by gentle slopes that seem to be impassable by foot or anything really and an AI that fails to allow you to use the terrain in flanking manoeuvres and similar. Other level problems emerge with cut scenes, some seem just bolted on, giving a patchwork feel to the game. Some blend well with the action but others make you wonder whether this was stitched together by committee at some point. Worse is that with the fighter as you complete one mission the autopilot kicks in and tries to land, misses, bounces, corrects, overcorrects, misses, bounces, corrects, overcorrects� - ad, seemingly, infinitum, certainly for ten minutes, since as a cut scene the fighter could not be destroyed. Disappointing. Only recourse was to quit the mission.

There are times when Breed does contrive to sparkle and you see flashes of something, though never quite what. Currently however it is a mess, a waste of a good engine, smothered by bad AI and cut scene problems that really do not make you want to play again. Admittedly there maybe an improvement later but by that point most may have given up or won't care. A pity.

Chris Snook

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Review Summary:

A gorgeous looking and sounding title that has what could be a revolutionary engine pushing things along. All this is unfortunately is let down by suspect AI, clipping errors and a bundle of other niggles. All of which hides what could have been a very, very good game - worthy of the much-touted 'Halo Killer' tag that it picked up last year. For die hard combatants only - unfortunately.

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Breed
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