The Digest: If Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Battlefield Bad Company had a baby it would be called Breach.  This multiplayer only Xbox Live arcade title gives you a lot of bang (and boom) for your buck.

THE FACT SHEET

RELEASE DATE: January 26, 2011
DEVELOPER: Atomic Games
ESRB RATING: “T” for Teen
GENRE: Shooter

PRODUCT OVERVIEW: Breach is a first-person multiplayer shooter that arms you with a Destruction Toolbox – a whole new set of real military tactics that are not possible in any other military game.  Use these new tactics to shock, manipulate, and obliterate your opponents.

Join the CIA’s mysterious Special Activities Division as it executes deniable operations. Breach brings the clandestine world of black operations to life with accurate weapons, gear, and unique real-life spy gadgets that you can earn based on your performance.

Shatter the conventional tactics of other games. Your Destruction Toolbox makes multiplayer combat much more like the real thing.

PRODUCT FEATURES:

• Destruction Toolbox
• Active Cover
• Xbox LIVE Leaderboards
• Gadgets & Perks
• 5 large maps

Breach is a military shooter that brings a great balance of destructible environments, active cover, and first person shooter elements all together for a price to fit anyone’s budget.  Breach has no campaign mode and is strictly an online multiplayer game.  So if you don’t plan on playing this on Xbox Live then skip this purchase.

When you first start the game you are introduced with a good amount of options to choose from.  You can jump into a quick match or host your own game choosing from 5 distinct game types.  You can also use a find match option which will show you who is hosting the game, how many players are in the game, the game type, and the current map.

I found that leaving and joining games was very smooth.  You could jump in and out of a game at any moment.  When you join a game you are assigned to either a red team or a blue team.  There is no free for all option so if you don’t play well with others this might not be the game for you.

The game types offer enough variation that you stay busy for a while trying to master each game type.  The game types range from a conquest style “infiltration” to last man standing “sole survivor”.  I did find the retrieval was one of the more difficult game modes to get into.  Its basically capture the flag except you are picking up a good size canister and it slows you down considerably.  In fact it slows you down so bad that any sniper can pick you off with in seconds of picking up the canister.

Initially you have 4 classes available to you : Rifleman, Sniper, Gunner, and Support.  After you have mastered the Sniper and Rifleman class you unlock a hybrid Sniper/Rifleman class called Recon.  I found that on most of the maps had good points to set up snipers but in some game types like infiltration a Sniper class did little good.  Same with the Support class which is basically a shotgunning short range class.  I found most of the time I switched out between the Rifleman and Gunner classes.

Each class is equipped with a distinct main weapon and has a secondary pistol to start the game.  As you earn credits for getting kills, capturing points in infiltration, or capturing canisters in retrieval you can unlock certain upgraded weapons, gadgets, and perks.  I found that you will be playing for a long time to get enough credits to get some of the better add-ons in the game.  My only guess this is to even the battle field for newbies to the game since a player with better weapons and perks would have a distinct advantage in any game type.

One of my problems with the game is you cannot pick up weapons from fallen players.  So the loadout you spawn with is what you are stuck until you die.  I also wished you could customize your class just a little, since each class is tied to its weapons unless you upgrade.

The environments and visuals of this game are excellent for an arcade.  The added destructible environments are pretty amazing as well.  In fact sometimes things blow up a little too easy.  In one game a teammate caused an explosion at a capture point in infiltration mode.  The next thing we know 4 teammates are dead and the one that caused the explosion got credit for all 4 kills.  While I was upset about getting killed by a teammate I was at least in awe of the environment blowing up.

The destructible environments play well into the strategy of the games.  You can quickly blow up a bridge to cause a choke point and in almost every game I played this happened and made for some great firefights over those choke points.

Another interesting aspect of the environments is you can strategically shoot certain parts of the environment to gain an advantage.  On one map called ‘Nocturnal,’ the map happens at night and in some tunnels the only light you have come from some overhead lights.  If you shoot out the lights you have one long dark tunnel which makes for some fun firefights in the dark that are only lit up by the fire of your guns.

Another great aspect of this game that few other shooters have is the Active Cover system.  With a few clicks you switch from a first person shooter to a third person shooter firing bullets from the safety of some cover.  When in cover you can blind fire or peak out and get a little more accurate and zoom in on the enemy with a bit more protection.  I found at first it was hard to adept to this but once I learned how to use the active cover well it was used often to stay out of death traps on certain maps.

The game does have a few minor glitches.  Sometimes when you toss a grenade it doesn’t always go where you would expect it to go.  I think I killed myself 3 times with my own grenade and a few times I threw a grenade it zig-zagged across the screen and missed my target completely.  Other times when there was a large amount of players on the map and several explosions happening at the same time the frame rate slowed down to almost unplayable.  But hopefully with a small patch these issues can be resolved.

Conclusion: Breach is a low price first person shooter that offers a variety of gameplay and some interesting new ways to cause mayhem.  It takes some of the best elements from other games and puts together a solid military shooter that should bring fun to almost any fan of the first person shooter games.

Single Player: N/A | Multi-Player: 4/5

Special thanks to Atomic Games for providing us with a copy of this game for review.