Breach

So, Breach was always going to succeed or fail as entertainment based on its destructible terrain, and its slightly more realistic, military tone. This includes a cover system and a mechanic whereby being in cover and under fire tries to simulate being suppressed and drunk on adrenaline by narrowing your field of vision.

Let's start with the destructible environment tech. It's quite neat. The option of breaching a building with high explosive instead of entering via a door like a regular human is cool. Hunkering behind a stone wall and seeing a hail of bullets knock one of the stones loose is cool. Spotting a guy manning a machine gun emplacement in a cabin and using a rocket to send the entire cabin crumbling down a ravine is utterly awesome. The problems with this are twofold.

One, using destructible terrain to change the game is harder than you might expect. No class starts with a rocket launcher, and the locations on the map where you can pick one up only hold a limited supply.

The rifleman class's explosive charges can obviously only be used from close range and work on a timer rather than remote detonation, making them only useful in very specific situations. Also, any explosion kicks up a believable fog of dust, smoke and dirt, making sneakiness impossible.

Basically, this isn't Red Faction: Guerrilla, and explosions and demolitions are more often a flavourful thing than they are a vital part of your tactics. A decent FPS player would be able to waltz into Breach and dominate a match without even knowing the game has destructible environments.

Two - and this is the part where that hippo turns around and locks Breach's head between its stinking jaws - what can and can't be destroyed in Breach is arbitrary. Certain metal bridges can be damaged, but you'll always leave a single, inexplicable beam for players to go crawling across. There are buildings where you'll be able to take out the walls, but not the concrete ceiling.

That said, on one level you are able to blow a hole in concrete, as hinted by a large patch of concrete which is a lighter colour than the rest, like something out of Zelda. Trees are indestructible. Steps are indestructible. Terrain is indestructible. Wooden fences are bizarrely hard to rip up with up with machine gun fire.

As for the cover system, it's just a bit broken. The game's still far more conducive to traditional run'n'gun tactics than, say, Gears of War or Rainbow Six: Vegas, meaning that (just like the destructible environments) an old hand at online FPS games could kick ass in a match without knowing the game had a cover system. Though he'd probably wonder what all those players were doing, attaching and detaching themselves awkwardly from various walls and corners.

Oddly, you get an armour bonus when you're attached to cover, meaning you take more bullets to kill, but it's nothing that won't be overcome by another player shooting first.

Drop in a handful of bugs (including one proper braincooker, whereby the game refused to let my character pick up an explosive charge required to destroy an objective until I appeased it by flinging myself off a cliff), and you've got something I can't imagine someone choosing to play over any of this generation's excellent shooters. The bar's too high and it's still rising, way above Breach's reach.