The Sarcastic Gamer crew was casually strolling past the Breach booth, lamenting that a stupid XBLA title was taking up just so much room on the PAX floor.  Frawlz bent over to tie his shoes, farted, and knocked over an entire section of the booth.  In the ensuing chaos of screaming booth babes and melting level designers, I got a chance to talk with the President of Atomic Games, Peter Tamte.  We got to talking, and it eventually came out that his intrepid crew at Atomic was involved in the whole Six Days in Fallujah public relations nightmare, and I suddenly realized I had stumbled into a real story.

Here’s the baseline for Atomic Games and their title Breach: you and a team of dedicated game developers build a modern military shooter based on the events of a recent military action in Iraq (Six Days).  Then, public outcry causes by the mothers of dead soldiers of that conflict who equate video games to devil worship cause your publisher to run for the hills like a spooked horse, leaving your team high-and-dry. What do you do?  You effin’ pull yourself up by the bootstraps, take your game cheap and put it on the Xbox Live Arcade as a multiplayer shooter.

Think of the Breach as a rival to Battlefield 1943 in pricing and Modern Warfare 2 in setting, sporting the usual game types like “capture the flag” and the like.  I was warned the graphics were not of the best quality, primarily because “all the money went into the other game (Six Days)”, and they’re not great.  But again, the idea is to be cheap enough to chip away at those folks who don’t have the money to keep up with Modern Warfare 2’s overpriced map packs and keep the game wholly downloadable.

The major piece de resistance of this game is the destructive environments it’s sporting.  Similar to those seen in Battlefield: Bad Company, the Breach team actually going a step further with the destruction.  As opposed to wholesale destruction, you can strategically shoot out individual bricks and wooden boards, poke your rifle through, turning a wall into cover you can shoot through.  Why not drop a grenade on the other side of the wall?  You can do that, because on the other side of that wall would be someone in “active cover”.

“Active Cover” puts you safely (well, “safely” until someone blows it out from under you) behind whatever cover you’re behind with the click of the right thumbstick.  Takes a little getting used to, but it’s effective, especially when it gives you the ability to lean out or blind fire from.  Come to think of it, I don’t really know of any other first person shooters that allow for this kind of cover system.

Destructible environments? Check.

Atomic Games itself draws its inspiration directly from individuals with a military and law enforcement background to make the game as realistic as possible; Peter Tamte started off originally developing small unit tactic simulations for “intelligence organizations”.  While a lot of games want to fake that kind of reputation, I spoke with their public relations guy Dave, and coming from both an infantry and military intelligence background for the Army, it was nice to talk to someone who actually knew their shit.

I also had to ask about Six Days in Fallujah, as the article detailing Konami pulling out from the project a year ago (wow, a year ago…jesus) was my tryout piece as a writer for SG!  Peter said that Konami pulled out for “convenience” sake, and that his team and he still had the rights to the game lock, stock, and barrel and were working their way on getting Moms of Fallen Marines on their side before they attempted to shop it around to big publishers again.

As far as I can tell, this definitely looks like a solid addition to Xbox Live Summer of Arcade 2010!

God damn snipers. Take that!