One of the bigger titles coming to XBLA this summer is the online FPS called Breach. Breach is an online first person shooter developed by Atomic Games. The team at Atomic have developed a brand new engine they call “Hydrogen” to power this near retail quality Xbox Live Arcade game.
You can expect 4 vs. 4 action using the current industry standard class system where you can select to be a rifleman, support gunner, sniper and a few others. The game also uses some high tech spy gadgetry to spice of the mix of tactics used in the game. The host will have the ability to adjust game settings including kills, time limit and a few other unannounced things in a game.
The two big selling points that Atomic Games are pushing are the fully destructible environments and the active cover system. The environmental destruction is similar to DICE’s “Frostbite” engine seen in its Battlefield series. The “Hydrogen” engine that powers Breach goes to the next level as each individual brick in a wall can be broken, and every wooden plank forming a structure can be removed with the simple application of some hot lead. The active cover system will feel familiar to fans of Rainbow Six Vegas. It pops you into third person so you can see over and around cover without revealing your position. This cover system dynamically tracks where destruction has taken place and reacts accordingly, allowing your character to properly hide despite broken environments.
With all of these cool features packed into a title that is tentatively priced at 1200 microsoft points (or $15), it seems like quite the bargain. What if I told you that we might be getting even more? When asked about the possibility of any custom content creation such as a map editor or character editor, Atomic representative David Tractenberg indicated that the team is still considering these possibilities. He mentioned that the PC version of the game would get primary focus with any potential map editing tools, but we're hoping the XBLA version doesn’t get the short end of the stick. This bit of news is exciting on two fronts. First of all, there is no official PC version support on the official Breach site as of yet and also an XBLA FPS with a map editor could pull some serious weight against even full retail titles. Here’s hoping that they decide to follow through with an editor of some sort because as we creative gamers know, custom content extends the value, lifespan and community of a game by huge proportions.
I got to play the pre-beta demo at PAX East 2010 and I can say that it is shaping up quite nicely. The destruction really is as interactive as they say and it doesn’t really feel like an arcade budget title. Battlefield 1943 is going to have some stiff competition on the XBLA FPS front. If they can polish up all of the little details and tie a nice bow on it be the time of release, we will have a sure winner on our hands.
