I was browsing Steam when I noticed Breach. It'd been out for a day or two, and when I'd initially seen it, I'd thought it looked rather interesting. Breach is made by Atomic Games. If you haven't been on the gaming scene for long, chances are that you've never heard of Atomic Games. They used to make strategic war games, in the mid/late 90's, but seemed to go down with Y2K, having no released for seven years after 2000. In 2005 they were revived, and began work on the Close Combat series, which they released three games of. The last one was three years ago, and they were again, seemingly unheard from, until recently. They were working on a game called Six Days in Fallujah, but it was canceled due to the fact that the events were very recent, and people did not want to turn the war on terror into a video game.
Something had to happen to that technology though. So Atomic Games began work on a small, cheap, first person tactical shooter, which became Breach. Breach is, in many ways, a brilliant concept. It has everything you've come to expect from a Multiplayer FPS nowadays, such as somewhat customizable weapons, the ability to modify your character slightly, points for kills, upgrading and unlocking weapons, and insta-kill knives. It has 5 levels, though one is just the same level at nighttime. It has classic game modes like Team Deathmatch, but also one mode called Convoy, in which one team must successfully drive their convoy across the map without it getting destroyed, while the other team tries to stop them. (The defending team always wins, though.) It has your standard weapons and classes, Rifleman, Gunner, Sniper, Support, and Recon, and of course, the truly best feature about the game, a completely destructible environment.
Now let's talk a bit about gameplay. I'll get started with the maps. I could just say that they were designed by a drunken blind man, but I'll delve a little deeper than that. All the maps appear to have been designed for Convoy, which means that there's an open road with almost no cover going through the center of each map. This is great if you're playing Convoy, but it sucks for everything else. The maps are horribly balanced, because only one side is really defensible, and since there's no cover in the roads, it becomes a sniper fest. The entirely destructible environments aren't doing the maps any favors as well, because it's very easy to destroy key points, and completely ruin the map, and match, within seconds. There's also the occasional spawning bugs as well. For instance, when the convoy enters a tunnel on one, you start spawning behind current enemy positions, making it very easy to completely destroy them, but when they start respawning, you have no cover, especially from above.
While the maps are certainly lacking, they're still playable, and fun. The classes, however, aren't. I listed the classes above. I'll give them a bit more detail now, though. The Rifleman is as said - a rifleman. Armed with a standard assault rifle at the beginning of the game (you can unlock more) he seems like he should be the standard soldier, not to overpowered, yet not underpowered either. However, there's nothing separating him from the Gunner, except for a smaller clip. The rifleman has no speed advantage, no agility advantage, no weaponry accuracy advantage, at all, over the Gunner. The Gunner is armed with what appears to be an M60, with a much larger clip, yet the reload time is practically the same. He doesn't move any slower, he doesn't have a different ROF, he's just as accurate, and it often seems like he has more range. So there's almost no reason to ever play rifleman, at least at the beginning of the game. The Sniper has the advantage of a scope at the beginning of the game, and that's about it. The game has horrible lag and collision detection issues, so sniping someone doesn't always guarantee you hit them. I've seen my bullets go into people's heads, and nothing at all will happen, yet other times, they'll die. Outside of that issue, however, sniping is very well made. The sights move smoothly and it's not too jumpy at all. Overall, it's one of the best sniping experiences I've ever had in a video game. I wish I could say the same for their shotguns, though. The Support class is a joke. They're armed with a shotgun, but it seems like they're shooting marshmallows out of the thing. It seems like there's almost no shot spread, and when you do hit someone, it hardly does any damage at all. The range is pathetic too, and the recoil is non-existent. Like with the Rifleman, there's no incentive to play Support whatsoever. Finally, there's a Recon class, but I'm too poor and pathetic at this game to have unlocked it, so I can't comment on it.
Next in line is the actual gameplay and perks. Animations are good, yet some are completely missing. You can plant a charge on a wall by pressing "Q" but there's no animation, the charge just appears on the wall, so if you accidentally press "Q" you may end taking out yourself, and half of your team. There is no entering cover, or leaving cover animation either, which I personally find very annoying, and it makes it possible to instantly leave cover. The cover system in and of itself is quite ingenious, especially for an fps game. You can enter (and leave) cover by pressing "X", and when in cover, the camera mode switches to 3rd person. You may then lean out of cover to fire, but you can also blind fire. The system itself is very well balanced, especially when you factor in the destruction system. Extremely well made, and one of the best I've ever seen, just about everything can be blown up. Bridges, buildings, and barriers alike can be sent flying! Few things are more satisfying than popping up behind a pile of rocks with an RPG, and watching it flying into a stone wall, and your enemy's corpse hurdling across the level. The RPG is severely bugged itself though, acting more as an overpowered bullet with almost no blast radius aside from what is directly in it's path. The whole collision detection system needs some improvement as well, oftentimes the RPG goes into the mesh before blowing up, and bullets seem to pass through people with liberty. This can often be quite infuriating.
The graphics aren't bad, though not state of the art. They seem to have used high-res texture sheets for the objects, making those very enjoyable to look at. The trees and some of the clips for the weapons appear to have some shading issues though, and the generated terrain is just awful, both in texture size, and in polycount. The snow also goes right through buildings, so if it's snowing inside, don't be surprised. I also wouldn't object to Atomic spending a few more polies on the character models either. Explosions look nice, and there's plenty of particles all around.
Finally, we get to sound. The voice acting says the same thing over and over again. The sound clip "Reinforcements Deploying" will drive you crazy, especially if lots of people are biting the dust. The guns make less noise than a silenced MP5K in a James Bond movie, and the RPG sounds like a firecracker. There's not much ambient noise, and I haven't really noticed the soundtrack, so I won't comment on those.
There's also a final few bugs I feel (for the sake of the human race) compelled to mention. For starters, there's an awful lag bug. The whole game stutters, and while a fix is expected (along with one for SLI compatibility) at the moment, it really puts a damper on gameplay. I can only imagine how the game would be normally, as the bug is very...intrusive. The collision, as I've also stated, is extraordinarily bad. You can empty a whole clip into a stationary enemy at point blank range, and still not connect with the hitbox.
Overall, the game feels like it's still in a beta stage. It's completely lacking in polish, and there's far too many small bugs that could be easily fixed, to mention. The game needs balance badly, and is almost infuriating at times. Yet somehow, in someway, for some reason I can't explain, I'm completely addicted. For all the game's bad, the good appears to be so overwhelming. So what's the verdict?
(Sorry for no images, X-Fire isn't compatible yet.)
Last edited by Bolkonsky; January 29, 2011 at 08:51 PM.
Breach
