Resurrection: Codename: Outbreak
Prototype…
Resurrection: Codename: Outbreak
Resurrection is a regular feature in which Resolution remembers a game from way back when. This week, Lewis Denby returns to GSC Game World’s forgotten gem CODENAME: OUTBREAK.
STALKER SITS in something of a land of its own. Its irradiated wilderness and cold, fear-filled bunkers are a world away from almost anything else on the PC, let alone gaming at large. Regardless of the series’ notoriously glitchy nature, you’ve got to hand it to Ukranian developers GSC Game World for creating something so totally unique.
But it’s only when you find yourself returning to a younger GSC that you fully understand how they got to the warped place in which the Stalker series resides. If anything, the team’s original first-person outing – 2001 shooter Codename: Outbreak – is even less restrained than the wildest of Stalker efforts. Throwing singleplayer, co-op and deathmatch into its strange mix, Outbreak still stands as one of the more valiant – if predictably less polished – attempts at something unusual within the action genre.
Unusual to the most ludicrous degree, perhaps, but it’s all part of what gave Codename: Outbreak the weird and wonderful character it still exudes to this day. It’s a game with such a ludicrous script, voiced in such a delightfully silly way, that early on the line “Looks like he’s dead. That’s serious!” is delivered completely and utterly deadpan. You don’t know whether 
to laugh or to punch it in its alien-encrusted face, but you do know that having the audacity to just drop that in there makes it endearing beyond anything you’ve played in ages.
Smarter than the average
It is, effectively, a first-person shooter about an alien invasion. There’s no surprises there. Set in the near future but still rooted in the early 21st Century, Outbreak presents a world in which a meteor has collided with the Earth, bringing with it a new breed of creatures that bury into the skulls of humanity, turning them into bloodthirsty killers. A new special operations unit is estabilshed by the US military, of which you are a part. And, in and around the zone where the meteor hit, you’ll spend your time blasting at the men these parasitic life forms have enslaved, and increasingly the big bad aliens themselves.
What separates it from the reams of other millennial shooters, then, is the level of complexity Outbreak manages to weave into its uninspired setup. Each of the game’s 14 missions is tackled as a pair – either with an AI buddy backing you up, or a second player providing the same support (oddly, the co-op version of the main game excludes the final mission). Assuming you’re playing on your own, you’re free to switch back and forth between the two characters at will, issuing orders to one another. If one character dies, you default to the second one – there’s no respawning mid-level. You can set waypoints and form plans of action before tackling the more challenging sections. And even before the mission in question has started, you’ve already selected the most appropriate armour type, and made the decision of what time of day to begin at.
Then there’s the smart combination of all-out shooting and careful, sneaky stealth-play. Codename: Outbreak features just one weapon, but it can be tweaked at any point to provide a near-silent laser blast, heavy machinegun fire, a sniper scope with a high-caliber barrel, or an obscenely powerful rocket-propelled grenade.
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GSC were genuinely gutted about the average-to-poor reviews this got at the time. One of the devs came over to Bath to talk to me about it and I thought he was going to cry, poor mite.
Great article, makes me want to install the game again even if I did replay it only a couple of months back.
What a well-focused article; it makes me want to play this thing again, it just felt too confusing back in the early 2000’s.
Mein gott – so I’m not dreaming every time I look at my shelf and see this game in its pretty green DVD case =)
A pleasure to have that little existential doubt rectified.
Moreso to know someone else has noticed how damn.. progressive, this game was. A lovely balance between fun and realism I’ve seen in -very- few games since. Actually STALKER is in many ways a less satisfying game, for the ridiculously endurant enemies and unreasonably weak, inaccurate weapons that plague the first many hours of a game. Not to mention the linear dungeons packed with scripted mutant attacks.
In short, Codename: Outbreak was good WITHOUT modding it, managed to implement functional co-op as a basis of the game, not a tacked on gimmick, and even indoors was a true sandbox for the most-part.
Oh, little memories. Those horrible alien beasties.
The voice-logs and details found around enemy bases, they were more ‘Deus Ex’ than Stalker, more System Shock. STALKER is in many ways embarassingly shallow in comparison. This was a subtler game, despite the truly incredible acting. Those deep robotic voices. The rather interesting Russian woman briefing you on the screens in the dropship.
Oooh, the camoflauge net! The proning! Accurate long range headshots! The transforming megaguns, the night vision.
Bloody holes in the bodies, allowing you to see how skilled your kills were when you go to loot the bodies ;>
The cameraview via your teammates eyes, allowing you surveillance via two screens at once.
Open world, rough guidelines in the mission briefings as to what you may expect, making tactical decisions every step of the way and never knowing what the very random, very ‘alive’ AI would do next.
Rather Freespace, actually.
Yes, in most ways STALKER was a step backwards. Pretty, but still as camp, still as buggy, and so much less ambitious. It was a triumph that STALKER ever crawled its way out of development hell, but they were a beaten, bruised, chastised developer by that point.
We can only hope their recent successes will give them the confidence to once again discover *ambition*.
– Jack
Well I’m definitely intrigued. For some reason I have the greatest urge to go out and buy this. RIGHT NOW. GSC, consider yourselves at peace.
I remember when I was travelling around the world for a year. Right near the end I went to a big electronics market in Hong Kong and all the screens were showing trailers for this game. It looked really awesome and I wanted to try it out.
But when I got back home a while later I discovered it had really average reviews, so I never tried it.
I think, looking back, that there a quite a few games in a similar position. Games that were, while maybe not perfect, so far ahead of their time in terms of ideas, that they got reviewed compared to the current genre – and so got reviewed pretty badly.
Outcast is another one. Playing it recently, in so many ways it was so far ahead of it’s time, and all it’s elements have now become accepted. But compared strictly against what was expected at the time, it didn’t fair well.
Well this article made me want this. So now I have it. Upon arseing around with it for an hour or so I must say.
Fuckin’ A.
It’s weird and the presentation of the plot is hilariously bad. But by Jove the actual meat of the Game surpasses most modern first-person shooters. I wandered, I shot future-cop men, I fell in a hole and it was filled with aliens.
It has most everything that I want from level design so far. If it doesn’t fuck it up to much…
Game of the year.
Hey guys I always loved this old game but I never had the full game. Recently I bought from play.com for just 3€! The game is so awesome, just like I remembered! So I created a Steam group! Come join and maybe we could arrange an online match! http://steamcommunity.com/groups/VenomCodenameOutbreakGroup