G-pinions

I'm quite pleased with the Outfit demo. The game will no doubt be buried in GRAW sales (which Brendan somehow argues don't correlate), and will probably be inferior when all is said and done, but based on the demo it's a pretty great game on its own merits. Ever since the showing I had at E3, and with all previews and marketing since, it was beaten into my head that this game was all about "Destruction on Demand", and balls-to-the-wall nazi-disembowling action. The single-player game may very well be about that (which would be great fun, I don't doubt), but the multiplayer is much more strategic, with equal parts RTS and third-person action/adventure.

In the mode that the demo is defaulted to, you need to capture objective structures (one in your base, one in the enemy's, and one in the middle), and hold them to gain points. There are four more structures as well, which affect the things you can order in for air-dropping - two radios towers (for air strikes and wiretapping the other team's voice chat), an armory (for machine and anti-tank gun emplacements), and a motor pool (for tanks, tanks that spew fire, and all sorts of tanks that shoot ridiculous amounts of rockets). The more you kill and the more you generally kick ass, the more points you attain for ordering fun stuff. You can also order reinforcements, and fix bombed-out bridges and anything else not completely broken.

So that's the basic setup, but choosing which areas to hold and which to airstrike and which to make a run for is really crucial to any sort of success; if you're playing with a couple other people on each team who know what they're doing, the games can go on for quite a while (which is a good thing). Oh, I should also mention that you always spawn with four A.I. soldiers to get your back, man your guns and generally be a pretty smart, useful squad. The games feel much larger than they actually are as a result, since eight humans equals forty in-game bodies. I haven't quite figured out how to command them, but there's a lot to the game I'm still learning. It takes a good ten games before you really see the nature of the game and learn your options, but it gets exponentially better once you do so.

People seem to be bitching about the vehicle controls quite a bit, and it's understandable; they control with a single stick, which is a bit jarring for those who didn't play Mercenaries and are used to daily Halo bouts. I like it though, since it has a sharper learning curve and becomes an asset you need to have on your side in more advanced situations. In general it's the kind of game that will get a lot more intense and deeper the more you play it, more so than a lot of the competition. I'm quite sure I'll be picking it up next week - if I'm having this much fun with one multiplayer map, I can definitely see myself digging an entire campaign, co-op, and full multiplayer privileges. Give it a try.