The backstory for The Outfit, though it’s really inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, is based on World War II. The campaign mode, like most real time strategy games is just a collection of predefined scenarios that are loosely bound to a canned formula storyline. It’s a reasonably effective way of bringing gamers up to speed with everything you can do in the game, but it’s far less entertaining than your average single player game.

The first thing the game shows you is how to move around. I stated before that the game takes place on the ground, but it’s not the same as the zoomed in mode that many real time strategy games provide. Like many other games The Outfit incorporates the concept of heroes. In Star Trek, these would be the guys not wearing red shirts. Everyone else is basically cannon fodder. You actually play the role of your selected hero and your view of the world is restricted to a view over this guy’s shoulder. This of course implies that you can only see what’s going on right where your hero is, sort of like a Fog of War from traditional RTS games.

Many strategy games incorporate squads to beef up the action and add a little extra complexity and this game is no different. When you start a mission, you get four guys in your squad to do with as you see fit. You don’t have real great control over these guys, they basically just follow you around and shoot any bad guys they come across. There are a few basic commands you can give them “Assault” being the most common, but don’t expect tactical maneuvers out of these guys. They’re just grunts after all.

While you do battle, invariably you are going to lose some of your red uniformed decoys and you will need more. Heck, you might even want something a little more powerful than a puny squad of infantry. Incidentally, that’s the very next thing the game introduces you to in the educational yet uninteresting campaign mode.

This is known in the game as the Destruction on Demand menu. The fact that it’s the second thing covered in the game’s tutorial makes perfect sense too because it’s the cornerstone of the game’s mechanic. Think of the DoD menu as the Tech Tree or the Build Menu from a traditional real time strategy game. Any time you want to access it, you hit the Y button and a circular overlay pops up with different classes of reinforcements you can summon. From here you can reinforce your squad as well as summon a whole host of interesting military materiel.

Like any traditional real time strategy game, there are structures to build for defense and structures built for offense. Regardless of your strategy though, all the extras cost. There is no notion of fuel, or resource mining but there is a standard unit of value used to purchase reinforcements. They are called Field Units or FUs (I wonder if that’s a joke) but I always think of it like cash or gold. You start the match with a little, and you acquire more by killing bad guys. You can even find treasure chests lying around the map that contain several hundred FUs each.

Right away you should be able to see how momentum can play a critical part in the game. If you are on a roll and wipe out your opponent a few times, you’ll earn more money and can purchase more reinforcements making their comeback harder and harder with each passing second.

Where you can really start to dominate is with upgraded technology. You don’t get to start out with tanks and air strikes. You have to build up to them first. In traditional games, you’d have to build a barracks to make the generic units and then augment it with some other facility to get the more advanced units. If you lost the other building or the barracks you’d lose the ability to produce those units. It works almost the same way in The Outfit. The difference is that you don’t build anything, the building’s are already there. Instead you have to capture it by wiping out any previous occupant and raising your flag in their place.

There is an Armory that gives you the ability to purchase upgraded emplacements like machinegun turrets or anti-tank guns, a Motor Pool where you get tanks and upgraded fighting vehicles and finally a Radio Tower that lets you call Artillery Strikes, Air Raids and even eavesdrop on enemy comm chatter during XBox Live play. All of these capabilities are supremely useful so be sure to fortify your defenses and expect a tooth and nail fight if there happens to only be one on the map.

These concepts are basically all covered in the campaign mode. But as I said, after a few missions in the campaign mode, you’re likely to find yourself looking for more. The online play to me was a much more redeeming experience even if exploitation of the game rules runs rampant. Sometimes it’s fun just to see how inventive people are at doing things other than what the game designer intended. Too much exploitation can indicate a broken game, but who’s to say how much is too much. You might even consider these legitimate tactics. Who knows?

The first I experienced was a gem. The theory is basically the same as spawn camping. In this case however, if you manage to kill the other player, while he is respawning it’s possible to set up machine gun nests all around his spawn point focused in on the center. If you’re lucky enough to have alternate spawn points, you can pick somewhere else to go, but your odds of getting control back when you are dizzy from spawning aren’t good.

The other has to do with two somewhat irritating flaws. The first is the infuriating driving controls. Okay, tangent time. There are many good things about this game. Some are just okay, but nothing is really atrocious. That is except for the way they implemented the vehicles controls. It’s like they ripped the control scheme straight out of the first Resident Evil games. Left and right rotate you in place, and up and down move you forward or backward in the direction you are facing. Now separate out the gun turret so you aren’t looking where you’re moving and voila, undrivable. And that’s just the tanks. Wheeled vehicles have a completely different control scheme. It’s so bad that half the time you end up stuck sideways on a slope while you try to figure out how to gently back up and get yourself pointed in the right direction. Meanwhile, you’re losing the war. Being stuck on terrain brings us back from our tangent to the second part of the exploit: Melee Combat.

Whenever you get in close proximity to an enemy, you can choose to engage them in melee combat and if you get the move off first there is no defense. You see an animation of one guy beating down another and then only one remains. Well, the same happens with vehicles except that the hijacker gets to keep the vehicle. When you combine the crappy driving implementation with the ability to hijack vehicles, nothing good can come of it. Goofiness yes, but not goodness. I manage to win an entire round by hiding in the bushes hijacking the poor slobs tanks and using them to destroy his defenses. When the tank got weak, I’d wait until he built another one. I won the whole match and never even had control of a motor pool. Exploit or strategy? You decide.

Whether you think either of those examples are truly against the flavor of the game is up to you, but there is a strong likelihood that you will encounter something that just rubs you the wrong way. It’s likely that you’ll have extremely fun experiences and some that are so cheap you’ll want to throw a controller or two.

For a good rule of thumb, if you don’t like real time strategy games like Warcraft or Warhammer: 40k you’ll definitely want to try out the demo before thinking about making a purchase. Even those seasoned RTS gamers may think twice about this game based purely on its awful driving implementation. You may find that the vehicles are not that hard to control and that you love the strategy and action. Unfortunately with a game like this there are as many differing opinions as there are people giving them.