Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway review (X360)

My apologies for the late review of this game, it really should have been completed over a week ago. But a rotten cold infected our household and we've all been laid low. But when you consider how late Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway is you should be able to forgive me, shouldn't you?

And we have been waiting for this game for such a long time. I was shown the game by Randy Pitchford at E3 in May 2006 and it didn't look much different to the game running as I type these words.

Hell's Highway is a good solid game, one which most shooter fans will enjoy, but it feels a little dated and released over a year ago would have seemed much better.

Market Garden

The hero of this latest instalment is once again Matt Baker, who along with his comrades are dropped into Holland by glider. Operation Market Garden, the Allied scheme to end the war in Europe early by spearheading into Germany via Holland was a bold plan. And as we know, it was a complete failure. The ultimate failure is perhaps one reason why the conflict hasn't been well represented in games thus far.

But kudos to Gearbox. In an age where many of us are bored silly of WWII shooters the chocolate-box Dutch towns and beautiful pastoral scenes present a wonderful contrast to the bloody conflict raging through the levels.

In terms of art design there's little to fault Hell's Highway. The main menus screen with a burning windmill succinctly demonstrates the light and shade within.

Into action

Hell's Highway plays very much like the previous games in the series. Along with your usual first person abilities you control one or more squads of soldiers. The elegantly simple controls allow you to tell these comrades where to move and which target to focus their fire on.

Success comes from moving these squads and yourself from cover to cover, picking off the enemy and using flanking tactics to ensure a greater offensive force despite your usual inferiority in numbers.

For this latest game in the series there are some tweaks. Much of the cover is now destructable, so hiding behind a wooden picket fence isn't going to keep your men safe for very long. And by the same token several German stormtroopers hidden behind a piece of wooden furniture aren't going to last long under withering fire from your squad.

You'll also often have a squad armed with a bazooka. This is wonderfully useful for destroying larger cover such as sand bag walls and vehicles.

In broad terms this gameplay mechanics are a lot of fun and make for an interesting diversion from the usual run and gun gameplay - especially as the most recent Call of Duty was ruined by sections of infinitely respawning enemies.

Retreat

Alas the actual implementation of these mechanics let the game down. While we're led to believe that there are many ways to move through each section the level design is very linear. If a garden gate is shut, then it'll stay shut. You can't just enter any house. So the streets are filled with very obvious paths because you are just not able to make many choices.

I've seen many a point where the ideal would be to put a machine gun squad in a building overlooking the enemy. Or crashing through a wooden garden door would completely outflank the Nazis. But the game just isn't designed this way. It's too inflexible, only a few items are destructible.

And while there are plenty of technical beefs I have with the game engine, frame rates in cutscenes and the like it's these problems with the basic gameplay that drag the score down. We're supposedly offered all this tactical freedom, but what that comes down to is a few cover positions we're allowed to use.

To make matters worse your squads aren't great shots and the player is too accurate. Your buddies exist to pin down the enemy. Meanwhile you'll often have to sneak up and kill the Nazis yourself. So again there's a lack of cohesive realism in a game that's trying to tell you that it's an authentic look at warfare.

Stalemate

There are some other problems with the game. The cutscenes are trying way too hard to be Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan, these appear overwraughts and are plagued by frame rate drops and texture/geometry pop-in.

The multiplayer is hardly worth talking about as it's just not very good and you're not likely to play with it very much.

Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway is a solid title that does offer quite a lot. And for the first half of the game you'll be thinking a score of eight seems about right. But the further you progress one becomes more frustrated by what you can't do rather than what you can do. And in the time between initially playing the game to coming back to it after my cold it lost a point.

Hell's Highway is a fun game. And it's better than most releases around at the moment. But if you want a new shooter and feel particularly drawn to something from Ubisoft, your money is better directed to Far Cry 2 than this particular game.

Another Brothers In Arms game would be welcome. But two things need to happen. One they shouldn't take so long to release it next time. And two, the player needs to be given much more freedom.