 
Written By Joel Perry
 Brute force is a tactical
squad-based, futuristic, military, third person, multiplayer, strategy game.
Following up in the wake of Halo Brute force is anything but a similar game.
From the ability to control 4 characters to allowing another player to plug in a
control and join you mid-game, this is going to be one big hit.
 Additionally, Brute Force will
lead players on through 6 worlds of game-play. With a multitude of weapons and
specialized trainable characters that will get the job done in any situation, it
should take the experienced gamer or barely experienced gamer a short amount of
time to learn how to exploit the strengths of their characters against the
weaknesses of the enemies.
 Since Halo’s success however,
Brute force employs very small changes to the control scheme. The B button is
now used to cycle through your left trigger items and the black and white
buttons switch you to another of your characters or activates your special power
respectively. The control pad allows you to give individual squad orders.
 Brute Force’s greatest failure
lies in its multiplayer support. The only choice is "split screen", hopefully
that will be changed before launch. Here is where you find the stupidity of
Microsoft, they put a network adapter in the Xbox for a reason, and not even
Microsoft is using it in their games. Why require split screen? Why not at least
give the option of allowing another Xbox to run it on a separate TV? If you have
ever played 4 player split screen Halo you’d understand. It’s just that with out
a 34+ inch television you cannot really see what is going on at all. And there
are still a large group of users who only play on their 14 or 19 inch screens.
Other than that the total lack of support for the Xbox’s "in the box" jukebox
system has been a complete waste of space. I ran home the first day and copied
all my favorite songs on to my Xbox so I could use it when I played games (I
really do not like standard in game music that much) and so far I have owned 2
games that support it out of over 20. I guess what I am trying to say is that if
you’re not going to use it why waste our money and your money on putting it in
there? (which makes me think of the HD TV support…). Okay back to multiplayer
Brute Force. You can split screen deathmatch, where each player takes control of
an entire squad of the 4 characters, or as I said earlier, another person can
just grab a controller and jump on in to your single player game (thereby
splitting the screen in half…).
 The main characters are: Brutus
your standard muscle, Hawk a psiblade wielding, stealth suit wearing assassin,
Tex who’s name says it all, and Flint a female android that "…can shoot a flea
off a dog at thirty paces" as Christopher Lloyd once said.
Brutus has the ability to use heat vision
(since he is reptilian) in situations where you would otherwise be in the dark
about your surroundings. This is an ability gained from living on his home
planet where the fogs of the swamps can become quite overbearing.
Flint has no special abilities
other than being an android and what one would expect from being such. This
includes immunity to biological weapons and gasses (does not breath), ultra
steady "nerves", and a calculating mind that can make such minute adjustments as
would be needed to take precise shots at long range.
Tex is, as I said earlier… Tex.
He has a huge health bar and can shoot 2 guns at once, so I guess he thinks he
is Antonio Bandera or something.
Hawk, who is in my opinion the
most useful of the bunch and my favored choice for control (seconded only by
Flint), has the smallest health bar, turns invisible as long as she doesn’t
attack or run out of energy, and uses the only melee weapon available, her
psiblade. How can you not love a girl who can walk past her opposition and
either kill them from behind or ignore them completely?
Visually Brute force is laying it
on the line with near constant special effects, be they user controlled or
background scenery. The graphics won’t fail to impress you, while still allowing
for high fps in game. You’ll get no less than Halo gave us, bodies and particles
flying from the nearest grenade explosion leaving bodies hang from precarious
locations afterwards, and evaporating player characters upon death. The terrible
tunnel vision from the sniper scope will also make players take note, as will
the leaves that fall from trees, clouds of mosquitoes, or even the fireflies
that come out at night.
Auditory effects should make just
as much of an impact as the effects from Halo, where you could tell when all
hell was about to break loose due to the way the music changed. The Seattle
Symphony Orchestra has performed the selections used in the FMV cut-scenes, and
the in game sounds make use of the Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound to assist
you in locating those who would do you harm.
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