Pure Judgment Gaming: 1st Entry

Hello everyone, this is the first installment in Terrible Entertainment Media, where myself (GoofyTooth) and my friend (Poke) will review and promptly ridicule terrible, terrible games, movies, and the like. (Let's remember this is all in good fun, if I don't like a game you do like, its not you i don't like, but the game.)

We're both VCU students living in Richmond, VA.

If you have a idea for us to write about feel free to send it to thegoof@hotmail.com!

With that said, let's get right to it.

Brute Force - Xbox (Original) 3rd Person Shooter

Let me preface this by saying I wasted only $4 and eight hours of my life on this game. When Poke and I saw it at GameStop for $4, we immediately thought of how we had only played the game a few times when it first came out, and we remembered it being rather fun.

But no. Oh, no, no, no. I don't know how I ever enjoyed this game.

Admittedly, the first few levels were fun in a terrible, campy, and nostalgic kind of way. We laughed at the bad writing, the bad graphics, and the laggy gameplay. But by the time we reached about the tenth or so level, it went from amusement to outright frustration and irritability. I don't know where to start with this game. It does everything a shooter should do, but badly and painfully so.

First off, it's a third person shooter. But not really. Its more of a put-the-camera-on-the-guy's-back-and-wave-it-awkwardly shooter. You really spend most of the game looking at the upper half of your character's scaly/naked/armored back.

Speaking of the characters, there are four main playable characters.

Tex - A human male who can wield two weapons at once
Brutus - a male lizard who can go into a sort of frenzy
Hawk - a human female who can go invisible for a short period of time
Flint - a synthetic (huh? but really though she's a human female) who can auto-snipe

Now you would think all of these characters have their ups and downs. But in all honesty the only characters who are truly playable are Tex and Brutus. Hawk dies from anything that shoots her, ever, at ALL. And Flint is also too fragile to use effectively, and while her sniping ability could be useful, there are no good sniping spots in the whole game. And did i mention HAwk and Flint are unable to pick up the three most useful weapons in the game? Oh, AWESOME.

The weapon selection in this game at first seems impressive, but it's actually about twelve terrible weapons, and three useful ones. Seriously, if you try to use anything other than the minigun, shotgun, or missile launcher, you'll just become annoyed. Oh, yeah, and you start essentially every level with a laser gun with regenerating ammo. Yeah, that's how you KNOW it's good.

Let's talk about the game's cutscenes. For as old as this game is, the CG work is decent and most of the cutscenes look acceptable. However, every SINGLE cutscene does the same thing over and over, but with variations in the speech. I shall demonstrate.

Commander Guy: Great job team.
Team: Thanks.
Commander: Your next mission is on (insert planet here). You have to eradicate (insert alien race here).
Tex: Let's DO IT!
Hawk: Mmmmmmmmmmmhmm.
Flint: (some kind of moody interjection)
Brutus: GRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!!!!!

There you go. Every cutscene in the game.

Also the battlefield banter from the characters becomes old in less than five minutes, because their vocabulary is less than fifty words apiece. Let me again show you an example of the only things each character can say:

Tex: I'm a giant bad-ass.
Brutus: GRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
Hawk: (She never says anything, she is always too busy dying/respawning.)
Flint: I snipe things.

It gets old very fast and you begin to hate when your character speaks.

The music is non-existent, and when it actually does chime in, it tries to sound epic, but it always comes up very very short.

The level design leaves something to be desired, and the final few levels seem like they were thrown together like a project due in six hours. Again, like much of the game, the levels seem to degenerate as you proceed.

However, the thing that really threw me off was the final stage, or I suppose what was theoretically supposed to be a "boss battle," but it was more of a lesson in frustration. The final boss teleports around several high towers and shoots missiles at you as you run for cover. You can only run around the level in search of a button which, when pressed, drops a meteor (OF COURSE!) on a small part of the stage. Shooting the actual boss will not damage him, so it stands to reason you wouldn't simply open fire on him just because. But in fact if you don't shoot him, YOU'RE DEAD WRONG. You need to pummel him with as much ammo as you can so he will teleport to the exact spot where you can drop the meteor on him. (Oh, silly me.)

The other thing about the final stage that i can't understand is that it is completely different from all other gameplay in that it can't be solved by throwing lots of minigun rounds at it. Seriously, the only truly fun thing about the game is using the minigun to put ridiculous amounts of lead in the air, so why they would remove this element in the final battle is beyond me.

In closing, since I only spent $4 on this game, I don't feel too bad. If i had abought the game when it was released, i would feel sick.

At any rate, this game is of course, terrible, so play at your own risk.

Therefore, I award Brute Force four out of seven fail.