As stated in the last preview of THQ/Relic's The Outfit, you could dismiss this game as merely a hybrid of Mercenaries with the context of Call of Duty. And it'd be an easy dismissal to make. The idea of the war zone as sandbox is one that Pandemic explored with their hit title in January 2005. However, The Outfit seems to have its own quirky charms that separate it from that other game, in spite of the similarities, such as three distinct characters and the ability to order up air strikes.
For one, the overall experience of The Outfit isn't one with the degree of seriousness that Mercenaries had. It's got a lighter, Hogan's Heroes feel to it that lends itself to the arcade-style of play. The plotline involves a rugged team of commandos led by the cigar-chomping Deuce Williams (voiced by Robert Patrick) who are infiltrating Normandy during World War II to help vanquish the Nazi threat. Along the way, players can destroy virtually everything man-made in their path with a plethora of tanks, jeeps, machine guns, and artillery.
Visually, the cutscenes looks somewhat impressive, especially in HD, although they don't have the luster of say, Call of Duty 2. In-game looks decent, although some around the office (not necessarily editorial, mind you) have complained that the game looks more like a sleek PC game than the sort of experience they've come to expect from other 360 titles. However, The Outfit tests the limits of next-gen in many other ways. Rather than focusing on eye candy and producing a game with jaw-dropping graphics, Relic has devoted their focus to creating vast, sprawling maps in which everything (yes, everything) can be blown to high hell thanks to their implementation of the Havok physics engine, and weapons can be ordered on demand faster than most people can click and order programming off their cable box. In that sense, the game really feels next-gen; there's no way that Relic could have re-created this level of full-on chaos on the Xbox.
Speaking of ordering on demand, DoD, or Destruction on Demand, is one of the most crucial features of gameplay. Besides running around on foot, which, to many GTA vets, will be their initial instincts, with a push of the Y button, players can pull up a menu and order anything from armed 4x4s to ginormous tanks to maul the foot-soldiers of the Third Reich. Just be sure to stay out of the way of an airdrop; a player can easily be felled by a flying tank. Also, as the fast-paced nature of gameplay goes, it's easy to lose troops along the way, so it's simple and cheap to order another airlift of backup troops to accompany you into heavy-duty firefights. If there seem to be any drawbacks, it's that it's not easy to assign men to a machine-gun turret RTS-style if the gunner has been killed.
