[Bond]

http://xbox.ign.com/articles/360/360770p1.html

Brute Force was one of the bigger Microsoft published games we knew about coming into E3, even though there were still plenty of questions about how it would actually play. We'd been introduced to the four characters, their special abilities and weapons, and we even knew who and where they'd be fighting. Now we know just how that fighting is going to work.
All four members of your squad are grouped together and the three that you're not controlling (if you're playing by yourself) are always hanging out nearby. Think of it like a third person action-adventure title but with four playable characters who are always right there waiting for you to control, and who will do what you tell them to do. Playing the game solo is going to require considerably more skill and strategy since you have to worry about every member of your squad and coordinate the movements of those four controllable characters.

You move and look with the dual analog sticks, but the movement is tuned very nicely for a third person perspective. Brute Force doesn't feel like a first person shooter control scheme adapted for the third person perspective. You have a targeting reticule on screen that changes color to indicate targeting and can show you information about the weapon you're using.

The camera system either requires some tweaking or just takes a little getting used to because sometimes it floats things to one side or the other and zooms in a tad so that the character you're controlling is on the side of your screen rather than in the middle. Ostensibly this is done to better show the action around the reticule in the middle of the screen when a firefight breaks out. But once the threat is dealt with the camera is slow to correct itself and return to its regular position. Again, this is something that seems easy enough to tighten up and could be one of those things that the team at Digital Anvil is putting out there to get public feedback.

Every button on the Xbox controller is going to be used in Brute Force. The right trigger fires your weapon, the left trigger uses whatever item you have selected in your inventory like health kits, grenades etc. Every commando carries two weapons, so you switch between them with Y. Black rotates through your commandos and white activates the special ability of the character you're controlling. The special ability can be toggled on and it drains your "special" energy until you either toggle it off or it runs out. The special meter refills automatically.

Flint is your sniper so her special ability is zooming in with her high powered rifle and the cursor is super still. Hawk can turn invisible which drains energy very quickly. Tex busts out his twin rapid fire hand cannons that come with enough ammo to cut down an entire forest. Brutus's special attack activates his galloping charge attack which can level enemies like so many bowling pins.

And then there's the D-Pad. Tapping any direction on the D-Pad pulls up the command menu where you'll get a picture of each commando at each direction. You tap the D-Pad in the direction of the character(s) you wan to issue commands to and then you have a choice of four commands on the colored face buttons. You can tell your teammates to Engage, Follow, Move and Defend. Engage puts them in an aggressive mode and they go looking for trouble. Follow and Defend tells them to trail and protect you, respectively.

Once commands are issued, you'll get an audio confirmation from each character, and they'll run off and do their thing. If you don't issue any commands to your soldiers, they'll automatically follow you and engage any enemies that fire on them or who stumble within range. But this is where the strategic elements of Brute Force are obvious. You have to take into account all of your team's strengths and weaknesses when issuing orders so that you don't get your sniper leading a charge into a hostile area.

Obviously Brute Force is going to feature co-op play for up to four characters which will eliminate the need for issuing commands. You can just yell at your buddy next to you to get him to co-operate. But you can also play two players head to head in Brute Force where you take your four commandos against your buddies four soldiers.

Outlook: We're not sure if Brute Force is indeed the next Halo, but it's definitely a genre busting experience that's going to force us to come up with new descriptions and expectations for tactical squad based games. Conflict: Desert Storm is extremely similar to Brute Force in concept, but BF's sci-fi theme and Digital Anvil's expertise will more than likely make Microsoft's game the new standard for tactical combat.

OXM had a great 12 or so page article on Brute Force about a month back, it's really going to be a great game. Probably not a Halo killer, but still great.