There is nothing. Nothing at all. Try and dig for any feelings on The Outfit and you simply plough further and further into a black abyss where emotions don’t exist and the word ‘meh’ becomes king. There are no feelings of love, there are no feelings of hate. There is merely a long, continuous feeling of numb ambivalence. The Outfit leaves you feeling numb. There is nothing.

There should be something. After all, you spend your Outfit time driving along picturesque countryside dealing picturesque death to anyone who dares to stand in your way. Usually with squad members, sometimes with airstrikes, mostly with tanks. The more destructive you are, the more Field Units you earn. The more Field Units you earn, the more weapons of war you can summon, the more destructive you can be. See? It’s a big, incestuous circle of explosions and death. It’s the sort of flexible and inventive war system that General Eisenhower would approve of. Click your fingers and lo, a rumbling metal beast of death is summoned to set fire to the Axis peasants and villages. As you work your way through the token training level, already you can sniff the potential that’s lying dormant in this system. ‘Wow’, you might think if you thought out loud while playing games, ‘I can’t wait to see how my ability to use Destruction On Demand will manifest itself through the more elaborate and challenging set pieces. Yes sir!’

Then the second level kicks off and you’re doing the same thing again. Run forward, see danger, use Destruction On Demand, call a tank in, clear the danger. ‘Okay’, you think (because you’re still thinking out loud), ‘maybe the later levels will provide me with some fresh and innovating challenges’. So you’re onto the third stage and surprise! You’re doing the same thing all over again. Then the fourth level is the same. And the fifth. And the sixth. The Outfit eventually becomes just one big hazy blur of explosions and tanks where levels are only differentiated by the shade of grass (the sixth level’s grass is New Forest green with a hint of summer) and how much voice-actor Ron Perlman growls about how he hates the Axis.

The problems stem from the Destruction On Demand concept being woefully unbalanced. There really does seem to be very little point in buying anything other than the biggest tank you can afford, then heading toward trouble and bapping everything with your biggest gun. Stationary guns offer little more than token resistance to the first enemy tank that rolls into town, so that’s almost half the menu rendered completely useless and closer examination shows almost all of the rest to be made up of tank variants. Occasionally, you’ll come across an impasse where you have to dig deeper into the menus to come, but by and large, the levels don’t offer any incentive for you to scratch your strategy itch. They don’t care. The levels just shrug their shoulders and run off to play Call Of Duty 2 while you’re stuck on a grassy knoll crying out for excitement.

It’s true that The Outfit scratches enough of its strategy surface for you to get a gentle whiff of the potential lying underneath, but that’s as far as it goes. The game just doesn’t pack enough of a punch in any department to floor you and leave you gasping for more, touching on various different genres and gaming styles without committing to any of them or satisfying your war pangs of lust. Call Of Duty 2’s suffocating sense of panic is found in dribs and drabs but never develops sufficiently into bowelloosening action. Calling in a variety of defensive and offensive units might remind you of Command & Conquer but this has none of the tactical nous from that series. The freedom of Mercenaries is promised but with your objectives all being linear, there’s no reward for straying from the beaten path. The Outfit feels too sterile, as though you’re fighting a war long won and you’ve been drafted in to clear up the remaining few pockets of resistance. Where promise once stood, you just end up feeling indifferent to the whole thing. This is war? What exactly is this war good for?

War is exciting, tense, unpredictable and above all, thrilling. The Outfit however, is stale, safe, staid and simple. It needed more strategy or action but ends up being the videogame equivalent of a yawn – once you’ve started, you’ll see it through to the end, but that won’t disguise the incredibly obvious feeling of boredom. You won’t hate The Outfit but you certainly won’t love it either. In the end, there is nothing. Nothing at all.

Ryan King