Brute Force (2003)

Beat on Hard singleplayer. I never had an original xbox and thus never even heard of this back in the day. I picked it up from a local bargain bin and it sat on a shelf for years until I decided to play through my physical backlog. This game definitely felt quite a bit like Halo. I found the weapons confusing at first, trying to figure out what the difference between each type was and who could use them. I tried out each character and the only one I did not really like was Tex; he mostly just shoots and the AI can do that. I did use him to disarm mines. I mostly controlled Brutus because of his thermal vision to detect enemies. Typically, I would move as a squad and if I got into a short range fight I would run around shotgunning in the face and drawing fire from the rest of the team, then use his regeneration afterwards. Otherwise I would see the enemies and plan out how to attack; whether to just rush in, use Flint to snipe and lure them to an ambush, or take Hawk in for stealthy recon and assassination. The depth of tactical possibilities was impressive but it was tedious to control 4 characters without any kind of pause or overview map and I often felt it was not worth the trouble to do anything too elaborate. I really enjoyed the game and would love to play it split screen coop. I did not like the final boss because it was a gimmick fight instead of an epic fire fight that needed everyone to work together using their roles.

7.5/10

Odd, I always thought this was a Halo competitor. I recall years ago reading that it could have competed with Halo if it had online multiplayer. But looking at their release dates (or even that of Halo 2, 18 months later) it doesn't make any sense. And it's a 3rd person shooter with some squad tactics. I must have gotten Brute Force mixed up with some other game.

Trying to cull my original Xbox collection, and I think this is one that's going to the "sell" pile.