When a very excited man in full desert combat dress runs up with something to tell you, it’s generally good practice to give him a listen.  At PAX East, the man in question was David Tractenberg, PR representative for Atomic Games, and the message in question was all about their upcoming XBLA title: Breach.

Atomic Games, who have previously worked on simulations for the military, are making the jump to the 360 with this 16-player shooter set for launch in early summer.  Much like Battlefield 1943, Breach is a “discount” title at $15, with a handful of initial maps and plans for expansion later on down the line.  To anyone who has played Modern Warfare or Bad Company, the basics of Breach will be very familiar: players choose from a variety of classes, each with their own weapons and abilities.  The more you play, the more experience you gain, which unlocks new classes and weapons.

So the obvious question is “what sets Breach apart from the rest of these titles?”  The answer, I quickly discovered, is Breach‘s detailed physics model.  As I moved out into the battlefield, Tractenberg explained that pretty much everything I saw before me was destructible to some degree.  Concrete barriers, wooden shacks, even trees were fair game to be blown to pieces.  What is especially unique about Breach is that the destruction is not pre-canned; depending on where and how I damage a surface, it will be deformed in a different way every time.  As a practical example, I was directed towards a machine gun emplacement sitting in a small wooden shack on a hillside.  To enter the shack, I could use the door, or I could shoot out the planks that made up the wall.  Each plank could be destroyed individually, and the damage reflected where I shot them.  Carving out a small hall in the wall, I jumped through and took a look inside.  The machine gun had a nice overview of the level below, but all was not as secure as it seemed.  Just as I could blast down the wall, my opponents could just as easily blow out the supports holding the shack up on the perilous hillside.

Rather than let my opponents get the drop on me, I instead opted to run outside myself and immediately take out the supports (this is sound military strategy).  After a few concentrated bursts of gunfire, the corner support went down, collapsing half of the shack down into the ravine below.  At that point, Tractenberg also explained that debris has actual effect in Breach, and that those big chunks of falling lumber could kill or injure someone unfortunate enough to be caught underneath them.  A few more minutes of roaming the battlefield continued to demonstrate the impressive destruction system, even being so granular as to allow a player to knock out an individual brick in a wall to create a sniper hole.

Breach also uses a cover system familiar to most recent FPS players, but with some important changes. “We wanted to make suppressive fire mean something,” said Tractenberg, “so you couldn’t just pop up from behind cover and shoot someone laying down cover fire.”  To that end, the “basic” class in Breach, the Machinegunner, has the ability to lay down suppressing fire that causes any target under cover from it to experience a “rattling” effect on their screen.  Their screen will shake, their target reticule will flick wildly, and loud noise will flood their speakers.  This makes simply popping up to fire a much more difficult prospect, and it will take some teamwork to rescue someone caught under heavy fire.

While we didn’t get to see any of the other classes in action, Tractenberg explained that in addition to specific weapons, each class gets a real-life “gadget” used by the military.  The gunner had an electronic ear that would spike when it detected noise on the other side of walls or from under cover, giving you a heads up before leaping into a room.  The other class we saw, the Recon, was the top unlock and had a huge speed boost, but was very lightly armed and couldn’t take much damage.  Tractenberg explained that it’s meant to be a class for advanced players, difficult to use but with high potential power.

Overall, Breach struck me as an impressive title for $15, and something I will definitely give another look at when the final product comes out.  Keep an eye out for it later this summer; I’ll be the guy accidentally knocking buildings down on his teammates.