The Outfit (Xbox 360)

Herald rating: * * *

If you play too many realistic World War II video games, as I have done, your dreams start to fill with battle-scarred landscapes of burning tanks, dead soldiers and oily smoke.

Then you have to resort to some farcical, unrealistic offering from the genre as therapy.

Xbox 360 title The Outfit served that purpose well. The makers should have just paid the licence fee to MGM and called it "The Dirty Dozen" because that's what it's like. Only there are fewer characters.

The meanest of the troopers, Deuce Williams, chews a fat cigar and carries a bazooka that never seems to run out of ammunition.

The graphics aren't great by Xbox 360 standards but the loose and live controls and freedom of movement make it easy to play.

Driving tanks and jeeps is liable to get you into trouble, however, thanks to the terrible steering built into the game. But it doesn't really matter. You just flatten the sandbags, depots and German soldiers that block your way.

The cut-away sequences have a creepy Castle Wolfenstein-like feel to them, with the Nazi high command portrayed as murderous psychopaths.

There are plenty of blistering shoot-outs but The Outfit is effectively a strategy game.

You're ordered to complete tactical goals such as protect an allied convoy or capture a radio tower.

Unlike other games, the object isn't laid out laboriously in pre-game maps. The screen zooms straight to the objective and your mission is summed up in a paragraph.

A ludicrous feature called "Destruction on Demand" lets you order in air strikes, reinforcements and armoury at the drop of a helmet. A large crate crash lands and you suddenly have a Gatling gun at your disposal.

The Outfit turns war into an action-packed cartoon and was just what a recovering addict like me needed.

* R16, $118