Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
*YAWN*, August 6, 2003
This game is ever so boring. It follows the general Microsoft philosophy of features over everything else: gameplay, story, mechanics, enemy A.I., interesting characters and enemies, locations, and most importantly, fun. I'd like to quickly liken this game to Thanksgiving dinner. It's like Grandma (Micrsoft Game Studios) worked really hard on the bread, potatoes, stuffing, pie and apple cider or whatever but completely forgot to make the turkey. It's not Grandma's fault; she's old. But she doesn't try to charge you fifty bucks to eat her dinner, does she? If she does, don't eat it; many good Chinese restaurants are open on Thanksgiving. If you're not American, you might be scratching your head wondering what "Thanksgiving" is. Thanksgiving means this game sucks. To say this game pales in comparison to Halo is an understatement. This game ignored everything it could have learned from Halo. Halo had a plot, interesting characters, fluid controls, good weapons, and addictive gameplay. Brute Force has none of this. Halo was by no means a hard game, but Brute Force barely even punishes you for dying. It hurts your score? You can just keep respawning until you beat the level every time! Talk about taking any possible sense of satisfaction away that I could have gotten. To make things worse, there is basically no enemy A.I. at all. The basic gist of it is: hide behind rock, shoot, hide, shoot, hide, shoot, die. To try to conceal this, the levels were sprinkled with places where the enemy simply wouldn't appear until after I walked by them. I knew these places were coming, but there simply was nothing I could do, for the enemies didn't even exist until the instant they surrounded me. Clever, guys. Real clever. From the very beginning of this game through the ending credits, this game was the least entertaining game I've played since... well, uhh... I'm sure I can think of a game worse than Brute Force... hold on... hmm... maybe this is the worst game EVER! That is quite an accomplishment. At the very beginning, the game was terrible because I had used such rubbery controls very seldom in the past, and certainly not since Playstation (One), but by the time I got used to the controls about five minutes into the first level (it thankfully allowed me to somewhat imitate my Halo control setting), I was already bored of the wishy washy combat and crappy missions. The game has many features that I've craved ever since Perfect Dark like being able to track your kills and other stats, but some of the most important features for any modern action game are missing here: vehicles, challenge, plot, and fun. Because when it comes down to it, the most important test of any game is whether or not it's any fun, and this game just isn't any fun.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ghost Recon Meets Halo in Brute Force Fun, June 4, 2003
Hi All. I have been on a game buying spree for summer the past month, buying 7 games, so I told myself I would not buy another game, but after watching the Brute Force trailers, I purchased Brute Force yesterday, and have already got my fifty bucks worth of fun out of the game, and am still doing the training missions.
Brute Force is a great game, its like Ghost Recon mixed with Halo. The first tutorial mission, seemed kinda wimpy, but by the time it ended I was having a blast literally, tossing fraq grenades, learning how to move, what weapons do what, etc.
Without giving any of the game away, training mission #2 is one of the most beautiful looking and sounding game missions I have ever played. I plan to play it on all 3 difficulty levels.
Multiplayer sci fi fans, will have a field day with Brute Force. Both System Link and XBox Live Support, and players can plug in and out at any time.
The cut scenes are some of the best in gaming history, and the best looking Brute Force missions, look better than non XBox cut scenes and games. Waiting for Halo 2, this game is what to play while you are waiting.
Music, audio, voices, and sound effects are great, another reason to have a Dolby 5.1 setup.
Brute Force whether single player or multiplayer is great fun. Its another reason to buy an XBox if you do not have one, and another game to show off what the XBox can do.
I played the game till 2am last night, and again this afternoon, and will be playing again later tonight. Believe all the Hype on this game. Its all true.
May the Brute Force Be With You.
Happy XBox
Timothy Kelly
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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brute Force is its own game, May 30, 2003
I've played Brute Force for 2 days now and this is my second review. My first impression of the game was that it is hardly tactical and mostly blow everything up. I now change my position, a little bit. Brute Force is tilted more towards being a pure shooter, but it is a lot more tactical than most reviewers give it credit for. I finally figured out what it is about BF that takes away from its strategic quality. It is the liberal respawning that pretty much allows the player to just run and gun, get killed, and then respawn. The enemy doesn't respawn and it doesn't start the whole level again. To me, that is called "unlimited life." You needed a code for something like that in Super Mario Brothers! In Brute Force you don't really suffer the consequences of a bad strategy because you just keep on respawning. Even after your whole squad gets killed, your whole squad will respawn and pick up where you had left off. Maybe there are stats that will get affected by your constant dying and respawning, but if there is, I really haven't felt the repurcusions. That's the main thing, if not the ONLY thing that makes BF play like a non-tactical shooter. Other than that, Brute Force is a solid squad shooter that requires plenty of strategy. If you actually took the time to calculate how many deaths you suffer in each mission and in between objectives, you're quickly going to realize that this game is no cakewalk and that there is a lot more to it than just shooting everything you can. The respawn feature gives you the illusion of invincibility. What it actually does is that instead of having 4 team members going up against dozens of enemy aliens, you would actually have about a hundred squad soldiers going up against a relatively small horde of aliens. It turns into a numbers game where the bigger army (that's YOU) defeats the smaller one (the aliens who cannot respawn). I'm not sure if there's an option to limit your respawns or to cancel it altogether and if there is, then I'll make sure to use that option. But Brute Force is undeniably one of the best squad games I've seen because of the adrenaline involved. I've read people's reviews that criticize it saying that you go from point A to point B and you just kill everything in between. True, but how is that any different from Halo? One thing I admit, however, is the commands available to you are too basic. I would prefer Conflict Desert Storm's command options because you could do a couple of more fundamental things like order your squad to get down and give each other med kits and weapons. BF sort of makes up for the latter by giving all players the same ammo and med pack when one of the squad members find it. Also, one thing I noticed was that the computer controlled team members dies a lot faster than the human-controlled ones. I've read in the previws that the AI of your squad is set up in a way that your squad will always look to preserve itself and not go out mindlessly and just get killed. So far it seems as though the opposite is true. In Conflict Desert Storm the computer-controlled squad member does better than the human-controlled, and you can be sure that he will get your back. BF's squad AI is a little suspect, but maybe it's because I'm not using the correct strategy. In conclusion I would like to say that Brute Force is a good tactical squad game and a great shooter. It probably works best with four players since you won't have to worry about the questionnable AI of your squad. It is still an excellent one-player game, you just have to really plot your moves, which is the whole point of squad-based shooters. While comparisons with Halo are unavoidable, Brute Force is an entirely different animal. Given, there are similarities between the two, but let me be one of the first to say that Brute Force is a deeper game than Halo simply because of the squad play. After the middle of Halo things became really mundane. They threw in the Warthog, a tank and a coupe of other rides to change the pace a little bit, but at the end of the day, Halo is still a pure shooter that really requires little strategy. Brute Force isn't that much more innovative but the environments are just more real and the firefights much more intense than Halo's. In Halo you had a bunch of running targets but you had the advantage. Plenty of times in Brute Force you will find your squad being attacked from all angles by intelligent aliens. Bullets will start flying from all angles and you wouldn't know where to begin your retaliation. Is it better than Halo? It is a matter of opinion. But it definitely is more technical and requires more strategy.
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