Halfway through playing The Outfit and completing a number of campaigns through my romp through Normandy, I just wanted to sit back and quote the infamous Hannibal from The A-Team, kicking back in an easy chair with a chocolate cigar in my mouth and muttering, with a big fat stupid grin on my face, "I love it when a plan comes together!" It's no surprise that THQ's first effort for the Xbox 360 will draw some slight comparisons to the classic 80's action show, as you control a team of rag-tag soldiers that take World War II as their own personal vendetta, wiping the floor with Nazis along the way.

Admittedly, the game has more personality than most military games of this type. You're introduced to the group of US soldiers you're in charge of, led by Deuce Williams (complete with cigar and attitude), and backed up by JD Tyler and Tommy "Mac" McIntyre, all specialists with their own little list of attributes that come in handy switching off between them. The fact that their characters are actually iven personality-driven voices is a nice touch. Robert Patrick (the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgment Day) and Ron Perlman (Hellboy) are instantly recognizable, and having a field day. And if Tyler's voice sounds a bit familiar to a war god, it should...he was voiced by T.C. Carson, who voiced Kratos in God of War. All three get the job done nicely, backed up by some authentic tunes and plenty of crackling sound effects.

The Outfit leads you on a boisterous campaign across Normandy as you work your way through France, liberating a number of areas from the Nazi scum while also trying to stay in one piece. The best part of this campaign comes in the form of Destruction On Demand, where you'll be able to enlist new soldiers who are easily expendable, as well as gain access to new vehicles and weapons that will come in handy for blasting the living crap out of things. This is a great campaign, and it introduces you to some fine strategic elements. Should you go with a tank that lumbers along and can take a lot of damage, or take your chances on a Jeep that can be blown out of the sky on a precision hit but can traverse land with ease? The decision is yours, and interacting with the results is part of the fun.

But not everything is peachy keen with the single-player mode. First off, despite the joy of killing all sorts of enemies over the number of hours put into the single-player mode, it does manage to get a bit old and redundant over time. You can try and mix things up by using different soldiers for the part or even using the destructive pieces around you for strategic kills, but the general goal barely shifts and this may leave a few people uncomfortable. Worse yet, the vehicle controls seem a bit sloppy compared to travelling on foot, leading to some unwanted damage or leaving a soldier on a crucial foot run where they're even more vulnerable to gunfire.

And then there's the destrucitve environments themselves. In The Outfit, you can literally blast anything to pieces and watch it crumble within its own foundation. While this is a nice feature that's well implemented by Relic, the sacrifice comes in the form of detail. The general appearance doesn't really seem to show too much next-gen, aside from the occasional explosion or effect from a far-off view. The cut-scenes could've used a bit of touching-up as well. I'm not saying the game looks bad, but in comparison to the competition, it could've easily looked a little better.

Past that, though, the gameplay still has a lot of oomph to spare, and although you can't really experience how significant it is in single-player, THQ's done a great service to us by giving us access to Xbox Live play. Taking the game online opens up a whole new door for The Outfit and makes it that much more addictive. You can either engage in the typical Deathmatch mode and go all out trying to prove your team is simply better than others, or you can tackle Story Mode with a buddy and help take down the Nazis in a cooperative effort, which has far better impact than you might expect. Involving a friend adds a spice of unpredictability to things, instead of relying on computer drones, and this picks up the game more than you might expect. You can only save certain spots in this mode, but who cares when you and your friend got your own A-Team tactics going on?

Strategic Victory comes into play online as well, adding a more expansive mode than your typical Deathmatch and Co-Op. You basically try to take over strategic points in a level within this mode, which isn't nearly as easy as you might think when you've got a barrage of soldiers and vehicles to worry about. It's nothing original, but it's so well implemented that you probably won't care, and it certainly picks up the game's tempo.

The Outfit can't exactly be called a complete success, but I'm not going to go and deem it a failure either. I think more could've been done with the vehicle handling and single player mode, and the graphics could've used just a slight bit more clean-up. But the multiplayer is outstanding and the gameplay, blending the best of action and strategy together into one explosive Mamosa, will addict many. As B.A. Baracus might say, "I pity da fool that don't give this game a try!" Well, OK, he would say it if he wasn't dozing off in the plane...