he game industry is much like the movie industry; there are big studios and little studios. The big studios have the advantage of large cash flow, which can then be pumped into the development of a game. The little studios, or indies, are often times left in the wings with little attention until they make some for themselves. Well, get ready to know the name Brat Studios, the little development house behind the upcoming Breed. Since the game won the coveted ECTS 2002 “Best PC Game Of Show” a couple years ago, the liberal use of the words Halo-killer have been thrown about the video game industry. Well, today I got a chance to sit down with a preview build of the game and am happy to say that while it may not have quite the polish so far to dethrone Microsoft’s landmark FPS, Breed offers up a heck of a play. Combining traditional FPS gameplay with a surprisingly deep feature of team-based tactical action, Breed really sets itself apart from other FPS titles out there that have attempted to pull off the same kind of feats.

The story behind Breed follows the patch of the United Space Corps, an army assembled by the people of Earth in response to a devastating and terrifying new alien race, dubbed “The Breed.” The population of Earth, having outgrown the confines of the planet, began to colonize other worlds in their star system, finding habitable planets that provided nice homes for themselves. Suddenly, the outposts in deep space came under attack by the mysterious alien race. Defenseless, the colonists sent out a distress signal to Earth, who then sent out the bulk of their USC fleet to defend the helpless planets. Wrong move. All of the USC ships ended up being destroyed by the aliens, and the Breed, sensing that Earth was now defenseless moved in for the kill and managed to overtake the entire planet. With the population of the planet either killed or enslaved and forced into labor camps, the future looks bleak. But, one ship remained; the USC Darwin. In orbit around the Earth and under the protection of a special cloaking device, the ship and its crew are mankind’s last hope.

In all, there are three character classes, each of which you’ll get to use in your team at the start of every mission. Aside from the standard “grunt” that excels in medium weighted weaponry, you’ll also have the talents of a gunner and sniper. The gunner is able to wield the truly heavy firepower like the Atrocity chain gun, while the sniper relies more on sheer agility and her ability to pick off distant enemies with her trusty Surekill sniper rifle. Quite similar as it was in the game Brute Force for the Xbox, you’ll need to be able to balance your use of each character as well as identify and manage each one for certain situations. While running around with the grunt or gunner with guns blazing will prove somewhat successful, you’ll often times find yourself faced with far-off snipers and mortar launchers that you’ll need to take care of with your sniper. The game does make it easy to switch between each character on the fly, as a simple press of the Page Up or Page Down button will toggle through your available (or surviving) teammates.

Being a squad-based title, the game naturally allows you to manage each team member to a pretty high degree through the use of some handy hotkey commands. Pressing the F1 through F5 buttons will command your team to form a number of different positions, which you’ll immediately need to educate yourself with. There are commands for things like making your teammates stay close to you, fan out from your position, become overly aggressive, and even things like having all of your squad-mates reload their weapons, all of which prove to be very handy especially when you’re in the heat of a firefight. While the command system for controlling squad members is pretty intuitive, I did run into some problems in actually getting them to work consistently. The biggest problem came when I was actually engaged with the enemy. Under constant fire, my team members all of a sudden seemed to have a mind of their own and didn’t really react well to many commands that I threw out at them. Also, the AI seems to still need a bit of tweaking in regards to how the secondary characters move. For some reason team members had a bad habit of leaving themselves out in the open, essentially making them open targets for enemy fire. Also, they tend to congregate in some pretty unhandy locations, which is evident when you’re switching between them. For example, say I run into a clearing and I’m suddenly overrun with enemies. Sensing that I need the skills of my gunner, I toggle to him to control. But, for some reason, the gunner has somehow managed to run off the side of a cliff, leaving him awkwardly and inconveniently out of place to provide reconnaissance. The problem didn’t occur all that frequently, but when it did, it was highly annoying. This problem becomes more obvious when you’re traversing areas that are particularly narrow or ones that are bordered with cliffs. Many times I found myself simply trying to hug the nearest wall that I could.

Outside of the squad-based action, Breed features some truly addicting vehicle use that rivals that found in most other games out there. Vehicles run the gamut from jeep-like four by fours, tanks, and spaceships. Each vehicle features its own unique controls and weapons and it’ll take a smart gamer to identify when a situation may be better faced with a specific vehicle. And, to make things even cooler, once in charge of a spaceship, you’ll have the ability to jettison off into space or back down to more level ground at will. Also, much like the game Halo, your teammates will also be able to climb into vehicles that you’re piloting, making them handy personnel carriers when you need to get to a certain situation quickly. For those times when you simply need a gun to mow down the competition, you can also utilize a vehicle’s weapons only, which proves to be handy if you’re in dire need of firepower, not transportation. To also mix things up, you’ll often comes across the ruined remains of previous vehicles, enemy weapon installments, and other random gun installments that still have some functionality in them. Being able to run up to a blown out tank and still climb inside and fire off some rounds from its massive turret became helpful.

Missions in the game are presented in a highly militaristic style and when staring up you’ll get a detailed mission briefing as to what you’ll need to accomplish during your action. While playing you’ll also have a handy mini-map that displays your team members, enemy troops that make an appearance, as well as “way points.”  Way Points are designated by small dots in the map and represent key areas that you’ll usually need to travel to in order to either navigate to your final objective or receive additional mission information from your commander. Often times, you’ll be in the middle of a mission and will get new orders from your commander to check out other areas of interest, say a downed USC ship. The mission system was a nice way to break up the action and also helped to provide some key story information, considering that when you start off the game you’re almost in the dark as to what’s going on. To add quite a bit of flavor to each mission, the game also requires you to gain a good understanding of when to bust out your guns or when to actually avoid fighting. One of the earlier missions has you outnumbered heavily by Breed troops with seemingly no way of escape. Running into the fray with your troops will last about two seconds before you and your troops are cut down, so to progress you need to use your environment to you advantage. This comes in the form of a small underlying beach area that encircles the enemy infested areas. By sticking to them and silently making your way around the Breed troops, you’ll get out of your jam unscathed. Its things like this that help keep the gameplay of Breed fresh. With a nice balance between action and strategy, I never got tired of looking for alternative ways to tackle mission objectives.

Control in the game follows the pretty standard FPS controls that you’ve gotten used to in other games of the same genre (granted you use the default settings). Movement is mapped to the arrow keys and looking around and firing your weapon’s primary and secondary functions are mapped to the mouse. Controls while in a vehicle also follow this control scheme, and as result, none of them seemed too difficult to control. While the controls were responsive, I was perplexed by some pretty sluggish speed while you’re on foot, especially when moving laterally. Strafing, always an integral part of any FPS game, seemed like I was wading through a pool of quicksand at times, which really put me at a disadvantage when in a fight. Also, I often times found myself getting stuck on environmental objects like rocks and trees, as well as to the edges of cliffs and drop-offs. With no real way to “unstick” myself from the cliff, I often found myself simply dropping down to lower ground, which was a pain considering the fact that the game features some truly expansive environments and that simply getting from point A to point B can be quite a trek.

The area where the game really stands out is in the graphics department. Not only does the game feature impressively expansive environments, it also sports some nice particle effects, especially in explosions and weapons fire. Environments are incredibly detailed and even little things like rocks and trees seem to have gotten a healthy does of visual attention as all are robust and vivid. Character models, too, looked nice and each unique character had their own unique look, which is nice change of pace from some carbon copying that previous FPS titles have resorted to when it comes to playable characters. Vehicle are also visually stunning, and watching the dust fly off the ground as I piloted around a massive tank was a nice touch. Also, a number of different environmental objects can be destroyed, especially when using heavy firepower like the tank. Trees and dirt will fly through the air during explosions and well place shots can even reduce guard towers to pieces.  The only problems that I did run into were some occasional texture tears during certain animations, such as when climbing ladders, but they weren’t bad enough to detract from the gameplay at hand.

While running around and blowing the Breed into the next galaxy, it’s nice to have some realistic sound. Fortunately, the game features some nice use of sound effects and music. Weapons and armaments pop and explode with realistic ferocity and gun turrets whir through their rounds in a convincing fashion. Vehicles also rumble and fly with realism, especially the thunderous tanks. In regards to your teammates, you’ll constantly receive audio cues and clues from them during the course of each mission. When faced with enemy fire, they’ll call out that they’re in trouble, as well as call for backup when they’re near death. Also, through the course of the game, you’ll be constantly receiving audio feeds from your commander, a nice change of pace from simply receiving your orders through a boring text dialog box.

Online junkies will be happy to learn that the game will feature online capability with a maximum of 16 players being able to fight it out at once. While the build we had didn’t have all the online modes available for play, we did note that there were three versions of Deathmatch; Team Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch Melee, and regular old Deathmatch.

Overall, my short time with Breed was both impressive and promising. Considering that I did sit down with a preview build, I’m hopeful that the few problems that I did have with the game will be addressed by the time the game hits store shelves. But, aside from those problems, Breed offered up some truly impressive gameplay and equally impressive graphics. With the PC video game market suffering a bit of slowdown as of late, this little studio game could end up becoming king of the hill until the still up in the air releases of such notable FPS titles like Half Life 2 and Doom III are ironed out. Keep an eye on the little guys, they may just surprise you.