Formerly known as Venom, the re-titled Codename: Outbreak is highly anticipated by those who followed its progress on the Internet.

Set in the near future, Earth has just had a near miss with a comet from another galaxy. However, as the comet skimmed the atmosphere, hundreds of meteorites broke off and crashed to earth, devastating towns and cities and leaving massive craters in their wake. Strange alien life began to grow in the craters and samples of the meteorites were taken to military laboratories for analysis. Soon contact was lost with the laboratories and the horrible truth was uncovered. The meteorites were host to aliens with fungus-like parasitic properties. Humans infected by these aliens lost their free will and became zombie-like, attacking other humans with prejudice.

The player takes control of a commando task force sent to investigate the crash-sites, look for survivors and try to neutralise the threat. Pre-mission you can select 2 team members from a roster of 12, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, selecting the men with the right skills for the mission. It's also possible to select what equipment you want to take with you, right down to the type of armour for each team-member. Sometimes you can choose to attack at night, creating an extra strategic element; for example, lights can be shot out so you can sneak into places without being seen. Each character can hold a certain weight of equipment, such as extra ammo, med-kits, key passes and (especially important for the night missions) night-vision goggles. Players can search rooms and bodies for extra equipment, but they can only carry so much.

Play takes place in a first person Doom perspective or from a third person perspective as in Project IGI or Rainbow Six. You control one of the protagonists while the CPU controls the other. With a single button press you can swap between team-members and order the other member to attack or defend. Missions take place both outdoors and indoors and are waypoint and objective based. Central command radios you with objectives, once all are completed and you have done all you can, you go to the drop zone for collection. The better you perform, the better your team gets, with updated stats and awards. The enemies you face are both aliens and infected humans, ranging from policemen to military, the latter being especially dangerous as they maintain their hardware and military savvy.

Your weaponry consists of only one rifle - but wait, different firing modes are selectable as the inner chamber rotates to facilitate everything from machine gun to sniper rifle to shotgun fire from one weapon. This means that you only need collect the different types of ammo for the single gun, keeping your weight down considerably. The versatility doesn't end there; it also has a laser mode that needs a charge rather than ammo and it can even fire rockets! By pressing the right mouse button you can zoom-in in any gun mode, which is a very useful feature as there are always enemies patrolling that are not easily spotted. Later on in the game you also get alien technology at your disposal.

The A.I. is quite impressive; enemies only have normal vision and peripheral vision as your character does and can only hear for the same range that you can. If they hear a distant skirmish they will come running but won't be able to hear you silently sneak up behind them. This makes covert tactics worthwhile because they will actually work. Enemies patrol, talk to each other, operate machinery and monitor security cameras. Also, each enemy has hit zones, taking more damage in different places. Both the player's and the enemy's armour takes different amounts of damage from different ballistics and chemicals.

The graphics are quite impressive, providing minute detail close up, growing less and less the further away you look, as you would expect in real life. If you look at the ground in a field, you can see each individual leaf and pine cone, it's only clever textures but good looking none the less. Each character is made up of up to 1000 polygons and are realistically animated. The engine also uses dynamic directional lighting, volumetric fog, realistic water effects and particle effects. These are particularly atmospheric in the night missions. Sound is also very atmospheric, with realistic effects and all the enemies make sounds consistently, so you can just sit and listen for them coming before you encounter them.

Codename: Outbreak uses many ideas from many FPS games in a huge melting pot that mostly works. It provides a good arcade FPS game with many strategic elements, which is very hard to do as seamlessly as this does.

Reviewed for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).