Scourge Outbreak – Review (Xbox 360)

Scourge Outbreak – Review (Xbox 360)

Scourge: Outbreak is an indie game with dreams of delivering a AAA third person shooter experience. Does it deliver?

It is the 21st century. Every kind of game it is possible to make has already been made, and a developer’s only choice is to retread old ground. Arkane Studios creates Dishonored, which borrows liberally from several games, but is still creative enough to be fun and become a huge success.  Naughty Dog takes the tried and true Tomb Raider formula and perfects it with Uncharted, creating something immensely enjoyable and hugely profitable.

Some developers fall to the dark side and create Scourge: Outbreak.

In a lot of ways, Scourge: Outbreak is the last ten years of western video game history compiled into one crappy package. A sci-fi, squad based third person shooter from Tragnarion studios, it plays pretty much exactly the same as Gears of War or Mass Effect, but a lot less satisfying. You will take cover. People will pop up, and you will shoot them. Repeat ad nauseam for three hours. Having fun yet? You can choose to play as one of four characters with their own individual, mysterious backstory. I swear to god, I didn’t make these up for satirical purposes. Macho military guy Victor “STONEWALL” Dantrix, token female Tasya “AMP” Semivolkova, muscular scottish braveheart James Robert “MASS” Lang and of course, how could we forget the “cool” one, dark and mysterious sniper with half a robot face Ramiro “SHADE” Cortez, a character so edgy that you’d have to tape pillows to him if he was ever around children.

scourge characters

Braveheart, Egdgey, Meathead and Girl.

Each of these characters play exactly the same as each other, with variations of the same abilities so slight you won’t even notice them. In fact, you won’t even notice the abilities themselves. All the characters have the ability to generate a shield and a shockwave from their superpowered Nano Ambrosia suits, but these powers are so useless that you’ll find yourself forgetting about them after the first twenty minutes. It’s much more effective to stick to cover and mindlessly fire at the waves of enemies with AI so bad they’ll run into your line of fire while desperately trying to find cover that was right in front of them.

Not that it actually feels like you’re shooting anybody, mind you. Each of the weapons is woefully innacurate, none more so than the shotgun which fires in pretty much every direction but the one you’re pointing at. Even when you do manage to hit one of the faceless drones that you’ll face for half of the game, it doesn’t feel satisfying. Projectiles (lasers…?) softly ooze out of your firearms with a soft pew-pew like you’re sharply squeezing a shampoo bottle, and when a hit is registered there’s hardly more than a soft squelch. In a game where shooting things is the main factor, sound design is important. If it doesn’t sound or feel satisying to fire these weapons or shoot down enemies, people aren’t going to want to continue playing. I certainly didn’t.

scourge gameplay 2

Okay, I guess I have to shoot this thing now. Can I go home yet?

The team-based mechanic is so worthless it might as well not exist. You’re limited to ally positioning, marking enemies for your teammates to focus on, or signaling a downed ally to revive. But the enemies are so easily dispatched that you may as well handle them yourself, and when an ally is downed you team mates will automatically rush to revive them anyway. Multiplayer offers the chance to have friends take over the roles of your AI squadmates, but unfortunately I have no friends. Even if I did, I don’t think I would be able to find anyone else bored enough to play this with me.

scourge gameplay 3 wheel

Shade, appeal to the moody teenage demographic!

It’s pretty rare that a lackluster game can be saved by its story, and Scourge is no exception. The plot is a hackneyed, z-movie affair about recovering a meteorite fragment, stopping the spread of a malignant alien life form and saving a captured scientist, the former being the plot of the Super Mario Bros. movie and the latter two being plot points in every sci-fi story ever. The voice actors are all just going through the motions and falling into the easiest stereotypes available, but with material like this to work with I really can’t blame them.

scourge cutscene

Ok team, you’ve been hired by ____ to retrieve ____ from  _____ or the world will ______!

OK, let’s be fair here. This is an indie game after all, I wasn’t expecting AAA results from indie production values, but one of the benfits of indie productions is that you don’t have to conform to the status quo. Trying to make a game that emulates the big budget thid person shooters on the market right now simply doesn’t work if you don’t have the experience or the budget for it. As a result the game comes across as entirely underwhelming, a little bit lazy, and no fun to play.

Pros:

  • It’s short
  • Fun in a bad kind of way
  • Colourful

Cons:

  • Completely generic and uninspired
  • Boring, unsatisfying gameplay
  • Terrible sound design
  • Stupid AI

Rating: 1 out of 5.

Scourge: Outbreak was doomed from the start. Tragnarion set out to create a game that could be sold for 800 Microsoft points and still convey the same expierience of playing a big-budget AAA third person shooter, but the final result couldn’t be further from their original goal. With boring gameplay, a forgetable story and the inexcusable sin of doing absolutely nothing new or exciting, I really cannot recommend this to anybody, unless you have a few Microsoft points to kill and what to see a good example of how to do almost everything wrong.

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

Scourge: Outbreak is available right now on the Xbox Live Arcade for 800 Microsoft Points, and is soon to be released on the Playstation Network and Steam.

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