Backstory:
Breach is a Small, multiplayer-only game on steam now for $15.00 (i got it on sale for 11.99, no clue when the sale ends).  The game is built around a number of neat mechanics. The world is almost completely destroy-able, and i'm not talking the BC2 style where half the wall dissapears and everything is hidden by a cloud of dust as the wall is deleted. In breach, every stone, brick, or plank has its own physical properties, and you can literally take buildings apart one brick at a time.  

Another mechanic that they included was cover based shooting.  Tap a button, and you snap into the nearest cover and 3rd person view.  then you can pop your head out and shoot from cover, or blind fire over walls or around corners.  But, because of the destruct-able environment, your cover can dissapear, FAST.

The Problems:
every one of these issues can be traced back to the fact that breach was developed by a small indy company, and that they only have a handful of ppl doing EVERYTHING.  and they bit off a lot more than they should have.

the problem that this game has is this, while each individual set piece is very good on its own, nothing fits very well together.  they have rendered each brick and plank for the physics, but when you build a house out of them, it looks like a child did it in "my first CAD design".  the environment is absurdly clean (no grass, pointless environmental garbage...) and thus looks like early versions of CS or Half-life 1.  

The weapons handle like a spastic weasels, every time you touch the trigger, the bobble around a quarter of the screen randomly, making firefights a bit drawn out and silly, even from 3 ft away (and the melee is worthless, you might as well spit at each other).  the solution to the aiming problems is to snap into cover, but the camera transition is jarring, and once your in cover, your hands have to splay across the keyboard and mouse like terrified spiders to hold all the required keys to lean out, aim down sights and fire. (honestly, WASD for the direction of lean, shift to lean, R trigger to ADS, trigger to fire. oh and if you want to throw a grenade? same thing, otherwise it drops at your feet...) *cue panicked running*

also, this game takes a TON of power to run. My compy is no slouch, (as many know from my incessant bragging) i can run Crysis at max and never drop below 45 fps.  That was my AVERAGE in Breach, the physics of a wall exploding made it drop to the mid 20s. Granted, I do not have PhysX, which this game does work with, and that probably improves the experience immensely, but the problem is, the renders and physics are done locally, so everyone gets lag and de-synced everytime something explodes (i.e. all the time).  

Bottom line, don't waste your time. hopefully it'll get patched and improved, but I think that while the concepts are good on there own, when you put it all together there is no cohesion and the game falls apart.  which is sad, cuz i like small developers and this project in particular interested me.

SSG.Braxis*BK*

lol...great review Braxis...saves me buying it...thanks

Thx for the info, Braxis. No go for me then.



Sgt.Sabotage*BK*