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Scourge: Outbreak Review
As if if wasn't already abundantly clear from that dishwater title, Scourge: Outbreak is not a particularly original videogame. It's a third-person, cover-based, co-op friendly shooter, and it bears a stark resemblance to about twenty other games that have launched over the past decade or so. But what's really surprising is that it is also basically identical to EA's rather enjoyable 2013 flop Fuse. That game coasted by because Insomniac Games are an experienced unit of top-tier developers. Tragnarion Studios - the Spanish development team behind this mess - don't have the benefit of that experience.
Story
If you're playing Scourge: Outbreak you aren't doing it in order to be told an amazing story, and Tragnarion Studios know this better than anyone. There's some chatter about rescuing some captured double agent, and you're tasked at one point with retrieving a valuable resource that the primary bad guys are also trying to get their hands on… but it's all nonsensical tat, and never tries to be anything other than that. You're here to run through corridors and shoot people, and to its credit, the game just downs its storytelling tools early and lets you get the hell on with it..
Gameplay
To cut a long story short, this is basically Gears-lite. However, as in the aforementioned Fuse, your ragtag team of reprobates (which includes a feisty redheaded lady and an angry Scotsman as standard) all have unique special powers. Unlike in Fuse though, these powers are completely uninteresting: they're shields, melee attacks and weak projectiles mainly. In addition to that, they're powered by a substance called (rather weirdly) Ambrosia, which like ammo and grenades is easily discoverable every couple of minutes or so during your travels. These special moves aren't powerful enough to be useful, despite the fact that a full charge of Ambrosia Creamed Rice only allows you to pull off two or three of them at most, before it's completely depleted again. These moves and techniques don't add anything new to the action at all, which is never anything other than dull, dull, dull.
Co-op adds a little bit more enjoyment, but because the game is so pointlessly difficult, you and your mates will spend most of your time together reviving eachother, which is a process that takes about ten full seconds. And that's only if the reviver doesn't get killed in the midst of reviving: an incredibly annoying eventuality that occurs roughly sixty percent of the time.
Visuals
If you were to show Scourge: Outbreak to someone from 2006 (the year the Xbox 360 originally launched) chances are they'd never believe that a downloadable game could ever look that good on the Xbox 360. But it isn't 2006 any more, and whilst it's an impressively large game (the campaign lasts between eight and ten hours on the normal difficulty) visually it's muddy and skittish. Facial animations are straight out of the PS1 era, and the cutscenes skip and freeze constantly. To put it very mildly, it's not pretty.
Overall
Fuse was a surprisingly enjoyable videogame despite how absurdly derivative it was, but Scourge: Outbreak simply doesn't feature the same degree of class or panache to stand out. It's monotonous and repetitive throughout, and even on Normal mode it's simply too difficult to be any fun. Blasting through the campaign with a friend or two on co-op makes the whole thing a bit less painful, but don't go in alone if you're looking for co-op fun. Over the course of four days, on around twenty different occasions, we tried to find active online games in both the co-operative and competitive lobbies. The only game that we managed to join was a co-op one, and jumping into it instantly activated a glitch which rendered our gun completely useless against all enemies. So at this stage, it's broken. But even if that wasn't the case, this would be very tough indeed to recommend to anyone at all.
3/10
Review By Chet Roivas
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