shots
| Breed PC review | |
| developer | Brat Designs |
| publisher | CDV |
| author | Chris O'Regan |
| date | Mar. 30, 2004 |
| graphics |   |
| sound | |
| gameplay | |
| value | |
| reviewer's toast | |
| overall | |
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| pros: Hordes of aliens marching across a hill to take you down! | |
| cons: This game is NOT FINISHED. 'nuff said. | |
Chromehounds
NA Review by Marcin
Oblivion-The First 3 Hours
PC Quicktake by walTer
Comic Quick Takes January 25, 2006
Feature by Mike
Breed has been hailed as the game to take Halo head-on. Developed for both the PC and Xbox, Breed features squad-based combat mixed with FPS action, with a few sim elements thrown in. On top of that it supports multiplayer. It all sounds great, doesn't it? It could have been the best game since Halo ... only it isn't. Read on to find out about the rather sorry tale that is Breed.
One day in the far flung future!
The developers of Breed decided to use the Big Red Book of Dumb-Ass Computer Game Plots by looking under the 'Alien Invasion - variations thereof' chapter for the back story to their creation. The story goes something like this: Set in the year of 2625, 23 years after an alien race called the 'Breed' launched an attack on a fledgling human colony. Earth responded to this threat by sending a vast task force to aid beleaguered colonists. After a heavy battle, the only surviving Earth battlecruiser was the USC Darwin. This ship sets off back to Earth only to arrive to find it taken over by the Breed. As it turns out, the attack on Earth's colonies was only a feint to take the real prize, humanity's home world! See what I mean? Every time I see one of these so called game plots adds further evidence that the book I mentioned above actually exists!
Saddle up Apone!
Movie buffs will recognise the above sentence that was uttered by Lieutenant Gorman in the film Aliens. Breed is heavily influenced by this piece of 1980's cinematography as are most FPS games these days. Breed places you in a similar role of the above mentioned officer, only you're a little more able that he was. You start the game by going through the 2 stage tutorial that takes you through squad management, weapons firing, vehicle handling and piloting aircraft. It's rather daunting at first, but the pace of the tutorial is slow enough to allow the player to quickly learn all the commands used for ordering other troopers and the use of vehicles.
Ahh ya bunch of apes! No! Scratch that! You don't even rate that high!
The first mission consists of you and your squad making their way across an island to an installation to get hold of some important data to help in the war effort. After strafing a radar installation with the mounted machine gun in the drop ship you and your squad buddies land on the island and proceed to lay waste to the Breed on there. A key gameplay mechanic is the need to swap between squad members to gain access to certain weapons, from the sniper rifle to Gatling gun to rocket launcher. All squad members can only carry a maximum of two weapons. This forces the player to keep the squad together and alive to maintain the required fire power to complete the mission.
Now this all sounds reasonable and indeed it works, to a degree. In one part of the level I was surrounded by mortar shells that were pounding the hell out of me and my squad. To resolve this I switched to my sniper and took out the gunners of the mortars and order was once again restored. Sadly while I was moving around trying to get the best shot on the shelling aliens my squad was following me about. Nothing wrong with that I'm sure you're thinking and yes, I also was comforted by the fact that my squad buddies were indeed covering me while I silenced the mortar fire. Only I found, to my horror that one of them had fallen off of a cliff to be trapped under water and eventually die. What was worse is that as I switched to him to save him from certain doom the rest of the squad then followed me and got trapped also. This was but the beginning of the nightmare that is Breed. [I thought DaiKatana taught us the horrors of shoddy squadmate AI ... I guess not! - Ed.]
I do like your desktop!
After I made my way along the island, making sure my squad mates didn't take on lemming like urges to dive off of a nearby cliff, I encountered an alien that would appear in a form of a grey box with an 'OK' button and the words 'Cannot read script #AA2828, press 'OK' to abort'. The only way to kill it was to click on the 'OK' button which would send me to this strange desktop environment. None of my squad members were in the 'desktop' place and I couldn't really do much in it apart from play this strange card game, which didn't have any aliens in it and nothing to shoot at either. In fact this moving to this 'desktop' place happened quite a lot while playing Breed that I concluded that it must be some kind of game play element that I couldn't quite fathom. Yes...that was it.