Though in the past the series has been developed for much more powerful and flexible platforms, the latest in the Brothers in Arms series maintains its high pedigree of overall quality with Brothers in Arms DS. While the previous titles in the series mainly centered on gritty first-person shooter action and the ability to command a squad of soldiers, the Nintendo DS version ditches both in favor of more straightforward third-person gameplay.

Though the game’s departure from the squad control gameplay mechanic that made the series what it is today initially seems to fit somewhere between ill-advised and outright insane, the adoption of a new style of play for the handheld version is a good fit. Brothers in Arms DS generally favors all out World War II action that seems more at home at Hollywood than on the History Channel.

The top screen of the DS shows your character in a third-person perspective and slightly over the shoulder so as to not be right in the way. The top screen also shows your current health, which slowly recharges when you are not being shot at, as well as the distance and direction of your mission objectives and that of any nearby squads of enemies. The bottom screen is used entirely as a control surface; the biggest section of which is used to drag the stylus on to adjust where your character is aiming and where’s he’s moving. Along the top of the bottom screen is a row of buttons where you can view and equip weapons, reload by dragging a picture of a clip down onto the main control space, enter aiming mode where the viewpoint is zoomed to allow for more fine fire control, and finally there’s a grenade icon which is used to, well, throw grenades.

Unfortunately, there are issues with the control scheme. On one hand the controls are well thought out; you can either use the d-pad or the four buttons on the right side to move, which accommodates either left or right handed players, with the shoulder button firing your weapon. On the other hand reloading by dragging the clip down to the control space seems a novel concept at first, in practice it becomes a largely unnecessary second step to an action that needs to be performed often and could just as easily been a matter of merely tapping the reload icon. When switching weapons you have to tap on the weapon itself and not the bounding box containing it in the menu to select it, which is needless busy work when simply tapping the bounding box for each one would suffice.

Their sometimes overcomplicated nature aside, once you learn the controls the gameplay begins to shine. You’ll fight the Nazi regime across Normandy, the Tunisian deserts, and the frigid Ardennes in three separate but rather short campaigns. For the most part the action centers around using a sub-machine gun and mowing down enemies in almost an action hero fashion, though to break up the blistering pace you also gain access to sniper rifles and occasionally drive vehicles such as jeeps and tanks to really decimate the opposition. Fighting tanks as infantry is almost a trivial matter, as if you don't happen to have a Panzershreck and a couple shells to expend you can simply run up to the tank and, through a scripted cut-scene that happens when the action button is pressed, simply throw a grenade down the hatch and be done with it.

Many other actions are similarly context-sensitive, which are performed by either simply being in the right area or by pressing the stylus on the action icon which replaces the aim icon when an action is available. When you run up to some sandbags or low debris you automatically kneel to take cover behind it, or you can simply continue trying to move towards it to hurdle the obstacle. In the same vein you can put your back to a wall and sidestep along it in order to spin out and shoot from corners and then quickly spin back to avoid counter-fire.

Though it is smaller than pint-sized Brothers in Arms DS does have a pretty respectable graphics engine. With its looks roughly the equivalent of a PlayStation 1 title the engine makes it fairly easy to distinguish between friend and foe; it also allows for special effects such as dust and smoke, and even set-pieces such as crashing planes and squad cars. The aural aspect is probably its biggest suit, with the sounds of gunfire and the ringing noise of near-miss explosions lacing themselves over a subdued musical score. The game features a meager multiplayer mode to round out its feature set, but is limited to a mere handful of maps and deathmatch or team deathmatch rules to play them with.

Though Brothers in Arms DS is admittedly short and has only a 'barely-there' multiplayer component the single-player gameplay is involving and the engine shows off what the DS is capable of doing. Minor flaws aside, this is a good example of how well a shooter can work using the stylus and is yet another feather in the Brothers in Arms cap.

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