Breed, like Halo, takes pains to integrate a single-player plot. You're fighting a war with some Covenant-like aliens in some far-off section of space, but that turned out to be a diversion. Meanwhile, the Breed invaded and captured Earth. The Darwin is the only space carrier of its kind now left in Earth's military fleet, and its crew and complement have returned to take back Earth, against all odds.
And "pain" is the key word here, unfortunately. First, there's the over-the-top voice acting from a character who never seems to run out of things to say. It wouldn't be so bad if he didn't talk so much, and if you could skip through a cutscene (at least after having already viewed it once), and if the timing wasn't off most of the time. He'll speak in paragraphs subtitled at the top of the screen, and once he's done with a certain line, he'll just sit there going through the "I'm talking" animation while the player presumably finishes reading the text that's just been spoken.
I know what you're thinking. This sounds like a small thing, doesn't it? In theory, it is. In practice, Breed is so aggravatingly unstable that you will sometimes have to load the game four or five times in a row before you actually get into the game, because it has a propensity to cave in when you (1), load the game (2), load a saved game (3) re-load a saved game and (4) create a save slot. Boom, back to the desk top, several times a session, until you just decide to up and do something else. Further twisting the knife is the fact that the game takes about a minute to go from clicking on the desktop shortcut to walking around in the game world, even on our 3.0GHz P4 review machines, which also have 1GB of 400MHz DDR and 9800 Pros. It adds up, and it's totally unpredictable. Thankfully, you can save at any time as many times as you want, so while the instability doesn't quite kill the fun factor, it will generally keep you from getting into a good fragging groove. There is a patch available, but it makes no mention of a crash fix, and it also deletes all your save games.
Speaking of grooves, there definitely seems to be a problem with pacing here. The first few missions actually put Breed in a pretty bad light, sticking you with a squad of fellow soldiers who have the stereotypical problems of poor pathfinding, bad aim, and lack of evasive action. Whenever you're not in an infantry squad, Breed is actually a pretty fun game, and you'll get a good sense of this when you hop in your first tank. Someone will man a turret gun while you have the main cannon, and you'll also be able to switch to rockets, guided rockets, and a minigun, just by scrolling the mouse wheel. The tank takes a beating, it blows stuff up, the controls are responsive, and it really is pretty fun to just plow through a bunch of bad guys, with the bullets flying everywhere and enemies popping out or running at you in waves.
Aerospace combat, however, has a significant shortcoming. The controls are responsive here, too, and the vehicles are generally pretty robust, but targeting needs an upgrade. There's no way to just target the nearest enemy, or to cycle only through enemy targets, and your HUD won't track a bogie that's out of your field of view. Once you can't see him with your bare eyes, he could be anywhere. Guided missiles can't lock onto ground targets, and there aren't any afterburners, either. There's also one particularly aggravating mission, at the end of which you must escort your damaged wingman back to the orbiting vessel. If you get too far away from him, the game tells you he died, and it's Mission Over. It's difficult to track where he's going, because he is set as a mobile waypoint, instead of the orbiting vessel or the arbitrary glowing rings you have to fly through like in Freelancer.
For some reason, your wingman achieves an impressive burst of speed every time, pretty much sealing your doom unless you actually hit him with a guided rocket, which slows him down enough to stay in range. However, as you elevate through the atmosphere, the lighting effect that makes the clouds glow ends up refracting everywhere, gradually rendering you blind, with nothing more than the wingman's waypoint somewhere up ahead. Once I figured out how to slow him down, I was able to get up through the clouds the first time through, but other people have reported problems with this segment.
There's another segment that shows why the flow of map design from Starting Point A to Destination B is especially important in a 3D environment. I had to get to the top of a hill, and there were two ways to go at the bottom. Going right took you to a SAM launcher, which you have to take out anyway for this mission, but that path is eventually a dead end. To get to the top, you have to take a long, spiraling road that will put the waypoint marker to the left of your HUD until you're almost on top of it. There are later sections where you're on foot and have to interact with several static objects spaced apart in various sections of the map. At one point, you're being escorted by an escaped prisoner, and he says he's going to cover the buggy vehicles while you unlock the main gate. The one you're right next to, however, doesn't open. You have to trudge all the way to another door and hit a panel there, and there's no waypoint to guide you. The amount of fumbling around a little aimlessly is just enough to aggravate you out of consistent immersion.
The game seems like it just wasn't meant to incorporate infantry missions, with the generic squad AI. In addition, it was surprisingly easy to get stuck on static meshes, to the point where entering a building or vessel that had taken any damage was an invitation to get yourself trapped. Further, you can't push your soldiers aside. Instead, you'll just jog in place while they stand there and stare at you. And God help you if someone you're supposed to be escorting gets stuck. Because of all of the infantry problems, I typically ordered them to stay behind while I did all the work, because they had a habit of dying, or falling off a cliff and dying, or triggering an ambush. Put them in a vehicle so they can't run around, and things get much better. These are supposed to be genetically modified elite soldiers from the 25th century, but they run around like newly-deputized Old West farmhands. Thankfully, health regenerates slowly (but actually drains to zero if you get down to 10%), so when they go hog-wild and take a beating, you won't be spending time and resources healing everyone before you can move to the next objective.
The graphically impressive but gameplay irrelevant object destructibility is a double-edged sword, and playing Breed makes it easier to see why this design element isn't more popular--it creates an unpredictable pathfinding situation. It also ups the realism ante, so if you don't go all the way with it, you end up with odd-looking effects like indestructible tree stumps and crates. While the Breed actually look more like H. R. Giger aliens gone robotic, their AI smacks strongly of Halo, with quick, diving rolls, lots of generally useless crouching, perfunctory usage of cover, and a lack of grenades. The Breed will generally just run at you shooting. And you know, that just doesn't do it for most gamers any more. Running through a snowy forest at one point, winding through the trees like a ninja, I dominated them just shooting from the hip, never stopping to reload or find cover. Because they offered so little challenge and didn't come at me in large numbers, it was more like Whack-a-Mole than First-Person Shooter. There are points where you'll have over a dozen of them coming at you at once, but they're almost always bunched together like a marching band and can be easily dispatched with a couple shots from the assault rifle's alternate fire mode, a grenade launcher.
You'll have a bevy of weapons at your disposal. You can only carry two at any time, but they're all fairly versatile, with each human-made weapon featuring a handy alt-fire, like the assault rifle. You'll also get a shoulder-mounted guided rocket launcher, sniper rifle, heavy machine gun, shotgun, and a few others during the course of the game. They're all pretty well-made, with a solid feel of impact every time you take someone down. You can carry a serious crapload of ammunition, though. The assault rifle has a 36-round clip, but you can walk around with thousands of rounds. The alien weapons are even more incredible, with most weapons combining types of ammunition and capable of supporting probably 5000 rounds in reserve. You stop counting after a while. It's great to not worry about ammo, but it gets kinda ridiculous when you can completely unload on wave after wave of enemies without breaking a sweat. A little sweat is good. Otherwise, there's a lot less tension. You'll also have medipacks and "engineer paks" that will repair any vehicle back up to full health, instantly. These are a lot rarer, but since you can regenerate health automatically, you won't need many of them anyway.
Overall, the visuals lack the sheen of many recent shooters. There aren't nearly as many polygons, and the textures are pretty much all noticeably lower quality than what you'll see in UT 2003, Max Payne 2, and the other shooters mentioned at the beginning. Breed looks like a game that should have come out in 2002 and is thoroughly outmatched visually by Far Cry, UT 2004, and Painkiller. Breed features an impressive view distance on par with Far Cry, but the overwhelming bulk of the game takes place on tropical islands populated with sparse foliage. There's very little indoor action, and what indoor action there is feels like Halo outtakes.