Atomic Games' XBLM shooter shifts out of its summer release window.
Atomic Games' Xbox Live Arcade game, Breach, has been pushed back from its expected summer release despite work being finished on the project. The studio now expects it, and the PC version, to hit much later in January 2011. No meaningful reason as to why it was delayed has been given, other than Atomic missed the "small window with Microsoft." Maybe it wants to move away from the seemingly successful release of Blacklight: Tango Down? Or maybe the developer just needs a bit more time with it. It's easy to want to get suspicious when developers delay games that they refer to as completed.
As a result of this release shift, Atomic will be dropping a new mode, dubbed hardcore, into the game. The mode is being described as something Atomic created as some sort of military training aid, and will be one among a couple of new features the studio has been "thinking of adding to the title" before this news broke.
“While work on Breach is actually done, we did miss our small window with Microsoft to get it up on Xbox Live Arcade for Xbox 360 in late June as we had planned," Atomic president Peter Tamte said in a statement. "Luckily, there were features we had been thinking of adding to the title, and now we have the opportunity to do just that. Unlike with Six Days in Fallujah, which was delayed indefinitely when Konami pulled out, we are publishing Breach ourselves, and it will be out in January," he continued.
Breach is a military first-person shooter game with a multiplayer focus. Its big twist is its destruction engine, which allows users to destroy cover and blast out even lone bricks on the sides of buildings. From what I've seen of the game, it looked good. I didn't have issues with the controls like others, but I did take a critical note on the cover system. When a person enters cover, the camera detaches and hovers in 3rd-person, gifting the user with relatively cozy total battlefield awareness. This kind of stuff never bodes well for a sim, especially one so purely focused on its multiplayer.
