Scourge: Outbreak

 

Scourge: Outbreak is a little known game from 2014. But really its from 2010, because it originally came out as 'The Scourge Project' which was planned to have episodic releases, but after the first two episodes it got such bad reception that they stopped, and then in 2014 repackaged it as Scourge: Outbreak with the last two episodes.
So theres four acts in total now.

The expectations going in were very low. I expected a terrible, low quality, low budget 4/10 game. It's a complete clone of Gears of War, its got all the same control scheme, snap to cover, blind firing, the whole nine yards. Its got a few differences from Gears that make it stand out though. For instance, it does have a psuedo underlying RPG stat system, where everytime you get a kill you get a satisfying text pop on screen above the enemy like +25 ranged kill XP etc, then when you kill enough you 'rank up' your weapon category/co-op category and various other things and unlock perks. Admittedly, all this stuff kinda just happens under the hood  without you ever really noticing or having any agency over it, you kinda just automatically 'rank up' and get new perks or do more damage or have more health I guess, its not involved at all and you barely notice but it is kinda satisfying getting experience per kill and seeing the rank ups.

It also has a sort of class based Ability thing going on. Where you get to choose from a few different characters, each with their own ability. But frankly these never mattered at all to me or my co-op partner. We never even ever really figured out what the hell our abilities are, and mostly found them completely pointless. In a way, I kinda like that. I just wanted a third person shooter, not something that demands you use all sorts of magical gimmicks. Atleast its in the game if you want to fuck with it, but if not, it doesnt matter much at all.

So the game is just a low budget Gears clone, but you know what, its actually really damn fun! No seriously, I am surprised too. I was fully expecting to hate this game, but the more I played the less bad things I had to say about it.

It's a fully co-op campaign, you and your buddy can just jump in with seamless matchmaking, easy to use and join eachother. You know how in Call of Duty it will say 'Checkpoint' every so often? Well in this game, every single time you get a 'Checkpoint' it actually logs it as a 'level' on the main menu. So if you ever quit to menu or get disconnected, you can join eachother again right at the most recent checkpoint. It's pretty good and it doesn't really waste your time much at all. Although, the game can be buggy and be really rough around the edges. Such as one time where the objective just broken and we couldnt progress. And sometimes seemingly if you 'reload previous checkpoint' it will actually randomly progress you to the next checkpoint!? very bizarre, but it only happened like once or twice.

The actual core gameplay is just fun and satisfying. The enemy AI in particular is actually really impressive. They're super aggressive and tactical, will frequently try to flank you, constantly throw nades at you to get you out of cover, and sometimes just run straight up to your face with a fucking shotgun and try to screw you over. It's fun. The AI reminds me of FEAR or something at times. We played on the Medium difficulty and it felt perfect. The game isnt a pushover at all, it keeps you on your toes, you can die super fast if you arent careful, and its got the typical co-op help your friend up revive system so theres a lot of moments where youll be yelling for your friend for help admist the chaos. There's all sorts of enemy variation, generic soldiers, then you start fighting these mutants and aliens, then later on theres a bunch of variations of the soldiers with different colors and levels of health etc. It's constantly throwing new stuff at you and changing up the pacing. Having to defeat helicopters with grenades, and boss fights all sorts of stuff

When you play co-op with a buddy, you have two AI teammates as well. So its technically a 4 player coop game. The friendly AI is decent, but sometimes can be a real pain in the ass not catching up properly or just hanging behind randomly. Luckily, theres 'auto regroup' when you get to the next progress section, which I appreciated.

The game runs on Unreal Engine 3, which was so very common around 2007-2015 I think. but it works well here, it makes some of the lighting and shaders be particularly impressive at times. I actually found some of the environments and locations in this game to have really impressive lighting and effects even compared to some modern games. One thing I thought was really cool in particular was the Glass graphics and effects, how you can shoot each individual tiny piece of glass from windows. Things like that arent even common in modern games for some reason.

So the game is a high octane adrenaline, almost tactical co-op third person cover shooter like Gears of War.

The way the weapons work kind of remind me like Halo or something. You just have weapon pickups around the map, with ammo caches scattered around as your main way to restock your ammo. Each weapon has its own unique identity and memorable name, like Firefly (full auto assault rifle) Reaper (3 round burst rifle),  Manticore (rocket launcher)  Barracuda (shotgun)  and so on.

But the way the weapons and ammo pickups work is that the developer intentionally places ammo and weapons around in places that they want you to use them. Like for example some sections youll be indoors, up against mutants, and it will suddenly start giving you a lot of Shotguns and shotgun ammo, but not so much assault rifle ammo, showing to you they intend you to use the shotgun on this section. Other sections wont spawn as many shotguns, but will have lots of 3 round burst assault rifles etc. And the cool thing is, you can find your favorite 2 weapons and keep them even between checkpoints. You can carry the same gun for the whole game if you want, I think.

The weapons also have a sort of attachment system, but only if you find them that way. So you can see weapons on the ground that say things like Reaper (ACC) , or Reaper (DMG)  meaning this particular gun has more accuracy or damage, they have dot sights and lasers and stuff attached to them. It's not a huge detail, but its a minor thing that makes you keep wanting to check out any possible guns laying around, so it prevents weapons from being overly boring you always want to find a 'upgrade'.

There's satisfying hitmarkers when you shoot enemies which really helps the combat feedback.

I like how minimal all the mechanics in the game are, you dont have to spend pointless amount of time fucking around in menu's or leveling up stats or playing around with attachments, you just pick up shit and go. Or shoot shit and level up. It's all pretty satisfying.

The graphics and animations in particular are obviously gonna be rough around the edges. It's clearly a low budget game, but low budget doesnt mean low effort. I think they tried their best with what they had, and put some care into the game. But things like the sprint animation in particular, some of the faces and face models, can just look super janky and laughably bad. It kinda adds to the charm for me, though.

The story is pretty much as generic as it gets, basically something like alien species taking over humanity through some disease or genetic mutation blah blah. It does its job, it also has really  campy voice acting and cutscenes that arent even bad or cringy, its just you know what youre in for and you laugh at it along the way. Some of the voice acting in particular can just be downright hilarious with how ridiculous they sound, especially the main Stonewall character putting on a super tryhard gruff voice. Some of the cutscenes actually look cool though, especially the horror inspired ones.

Level variety is varied enough, you got indoors metallic places then you go from outdoors green fields, Snow mountains, inside these crazy alien lairs that look like something out of Aliens. Its got a lot of deathmatch Arena style places where you have to fight which kinda makes it feel like a Gears of war multiplayer match at times, its kinda cool.

If I had to give my main complaints its that
-I woulda preferred if the weapons were more realistic than all sort of plasma based laser gun things, mostly.

-The enemy health can just be really weird at times. Like sometimes they'll be easy to kill, and other times they'll be insanely bullet sponge and take 4 magazines to take down. Towards the end of the game the enemies start to get extremely bullet sponge, its not too awful cause I appreciate the challenge, but it just is kinda weird how extreme it gets.

-There's a few boss fights, they're mostly pretty acceptable and a good change of pace, but some of them can be really lame or just kinda glitchy and the boss stands around doing not all that much (like the giant monster thing, although he has a cool looking model, ive seen much worse stupid looking bosses in triple A hundreds million dollar budget games)

-Allied AI can be kinda stupid at times

- Some of the objectives can be kinda confusing what it wants you to do such as the times when you need to kill enemies and pickup their DNA to progress cause sometimes you think its just bugged when it isnt

-HUD could be better, its kinda hard to spot where your co-op partner is at times

- Sometimes like the mutant sections you can still get hitmarkers even on corpses which makes it confusing

Thats kinda it for the major complaints though

When this game came out it everyone hated it, majorly negative reviews, no one showed it any appreciation. I think it must of been like Gears was still all the craze back then, and people were still playing Multiplayer Gears, so they figured why the hell would they play this knockoff? But I don't know, if you just want to play a decent third person co-op campaign shooter with a friend, and you want something kinda short cause the game is only about 6 hours long, you cant really go wrong with this one. I like how it's also like sub-genre Horror, its got a bunch of moments where its really horror inspired in the level design and with the mutants too. It's just good campy fun, it has the right amount of challenge, its not mindlessly piss easy you actually have to work together and have skill. Not a bad game at all, I kinda wish there was a sequel! In my mind, it's a hidden gem.

7/10