This year has seen no shortage of military first-person shooters, and developer Atomic Games knows this. It's pretty hard to compete on the same level as EA and Activision with Medal of Honor, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops all vying for your war-themed attention. But Atomic believes it's onto something unique with Breach.
After playing it for an hour or two against several hardened FPS players, it's clear to see why. There are some fresh elements here that will likely change the way we play these tactical games for years to come. And we have the studio's proprietary engine, Hydrogen, and its canned project,
Six Days in Fallujah, to thank for it.
There are two main pillars that set
Breach apart from other multiplayer titles. One of them sounds simple enough – cover. Atomic's president Peter Tamte told me that other FPS games don't have anything in the way of a real cover system, and as a result success can just be a case of whoever shoots first. In
Breach, there are knee-high walls and other structures that your soldier can hide behind to evade fire.
It works in a similar way to
Gears of War – click the right thumbstick when next to a cover point and the game will zoom out into third person viewpoint, with character movement allowing you to sneakily shuffle around to get a good counter shot. Or wait until a teammate flanks the opponent. Either or.
As you move behind your cover spot, your solder will automatically move around destroyed scenery, so if there's a hole in a wall you won't just walk into someone's sights as if you're in an introduction to a
Looney Tunes cartoon.
Another very cool feature of
Breach is in its near-total destructibility. Almost anything and everything can be shot to pieces, including cover, walls and structural supports. If you're getting held back by an opponent behind a brick wall, launch a grenade and get him out in the open. Shoot down a wooden pillar holding up a corner of a building roof to make all kinds of debris fall on someone who's gunning you down from above.
This level of destruction is nice enough, but what sets this game apart from the others is the ability to shoot down walls, brick by brick. This opens up new tactics of play, such as creating a mouse hole cover to peep through a building wall and shoot enemies from afar. The weapons are nicely balanced as well, with different fire settings for each that can counteract one another in a sort of 'rock, paper, scissors' fashion.
Not everything is totally destructible though – early code apparently had the ability for players to blow up absolutely anything, and it resulted in maps levelling out and becoming totally boring. As a result, certain structures can't be destroyed, but it won't be a complete guessing game as there are some obvious visual cues to help you plan your method of attack. Very hard looking surfaces like cemented stone clearly can't be broken, but wooden pillars and weak wall spots are yours for the blowing up.
Throw in a bunch of interesting game modes – alongside the usual base capture, team deathmatch and last man standing settings comes a Convoy mode which sees teams defending or attacking a moving target – and some new tactical gadgets like a 'bionic ear' that detects nearby noise and activity, and
Breach is looking like quite the hefty download package.
The only issue I see with the game though, is that its presentation appears so similar to that of other competing titles that one might be put off by playing 'yet another' balaclava-clad soldier wargame in the middle of a somewhat hilly green-and-brown map.
Although the cancelled
Six Days in Fallujah had some kind of distinctive graphical style and unique premise, with
Breach Atomic looks like it's putting all its stock in core gameplay mechanics instead. The game offers unique gameplay, at the cost of looking unique.
That may work in favour or against the game when it launches on Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and PC in January 2011, as the company is hoping to change the FPS genre with its advances in military tactical play. Keep an eye on it, if only to see how it can make you think differently about FPS games.
