Vehicle handling leaves a bit to be desired. Okay, a lot to be desired. Driving a 4x4 through enemy terrain might leave a player susceptible to a one hit kill from a German tank, but it beats trying to drive a tank around a level, which is an exceptional pain to pull off. Unwieldy, while a term that gets thrown around fairly liberally these days (and by yours truly as well), is the best way to describe driving in the game. It's actually worse than driving in GTA, if you can believe that. If anything could most likely hurt the final score of the game, it could very well be the vehicle mechanics, which sometimes make an on-foot assault seem more desirable, even if it's slower and more time consuming.

At this point in play, the single-player experience is fun, if a bit overwhelming and short for some gamers' tastes. With the arcade-style play in place, even the worst of players can trudge their way through the game with some persistence. However, after finishing a level, there seems to be a sense of exhaustion with the experience. There are some who will mow through the game in a matter of a few days and likely complain that it's too short. More power to those people. Many, however, will find themselves grinding through a level for close to an hour before retiring the game for the day and stepping away from it, partly because the lather, rinse, repeat nature of the single player campaign -- kill some Nazis, take over strategic points to cripple their defense, earn some bonus medals to up your Gamerscore -- gets a bit redundant after a while. Not that it's a terrible experience by any means; it's just that with the ability to quickly respawn and recover from being killed, The Outfit becomes a bit of an onslaught that assaults the senses from time to time.


We've tested the multiplayer twice at this point; once in Las Vegas last month during THQ's press event, and just shy of two weeks ago with THQ over a variation of Xbox Live that is used for playing unfinished code. The demo we played online with THQ went well enough, with no lag to speak of and a multitude of fun modes, but that's not to say that the Xbox Live experience will be the same. Once we hop online and go through the experience of both blowing up others to smithereens and others blowing us up to smithereens, we'll bang the gavel and give you a final verdict.

Until then, The Outfit is promising, but far from perfect. It's a fun game, although a bit redundant in its single-player campaign. However, the gameplay, outside of the terrible vehicle handling, is a lot of fun, and hopefully, the co-op multiplayer on Xbox Live should make the story mode much more exciting to play. After we hop on Live and experience both the best and worst that humanity has to offer, we'll offer you our take on this sandbox-style World War II shooter.