We’ve reached a point in the development of our awareness and understanding of the gaming industry where our expectations of what constitutes a “good” and “fun” title have been drastically raised. While titles that tend to just lazily throw a lot of bad guys at the player and expect him to run around solo, gunning them down in sequence can still appeal to many, more and more gamers are rapidly finding themselves desiring a more complete experience. They want “smart” enemies that take cover and use sneaky tactics in a realistic manner. They want realistic gameplay, such as limited inventory and a more aggressive damage model. They want scripted sequences and more elaborate storylines. And, of course, they want squads of friendly NPCs to back them up – not only because it makes more sense for a player to have a team watching his six, but also because it’s really cool watching friendly forces take cover, throw grenades, and assist the player in a (hopefully) intelligent manner. Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is a game I initially thought to be just another WW2 shooter, but thanks to a clever focus on tactics and strategy involving friendly NPCs in a manner almost similar in some ways to Full Spectrum Warrior, as well as a really nice overall presentation, I was quickly enlightened on how cool this game actually was.

Taking place towards the onset of D-Day, the shoes the player has to fill in Brothers in Arms are those of Sgt. Matt Baker, a quiet, thoughtful soldier who wanted to become a paratrooper, and ended up leading an entire squad instead. Brothers in Arms basically encompasses several days worth of fierce fighting in the leading assault for Normandy, placing the player into numerous situations that stress his tactical creativity as much as his ability to plant a round into some poor bastard’s skull from across a field of plains. Unlike most typical WW2-based FPS titles however, Brothers in Arms demands a more tactful approach from its players by bumping up the realism factor and implementing some creative gameplay twists. Rest assured, this is far from just another Medal of Honor rehash.

The most significant thing about Brothers in Arms is the “suppression” system. While the standard run-and-gun antics can still be utilized by the casual gamer, Rambo-wannabes who think they can charge an entrenched German position head-on will quickly notice that most characters in the game – including theirs – can only take one or two hits before going down. This is because the game’s primary focus is on using cover and finding ways to flank the enemy (as mentioned earlier, Full Spectrum Warrior fans will feel right at home) to take them down. When an enemy force sees the player, they’ll quickly scramble for cover and use it as much as possible, with German teams working together to protect themselves and keep the player pinned, and if the player doesn’t find some cover quick, he’ll usually end up lying face-down in the dirt. Fortunately, the suppression system gives the player a chance by marking enemy squads with a circular indicator (don’t worry you realism nuts out there, this can be turned off for a more intense experience) to show his status. As the player fires back at the enemy, the red part of the indicator will gradually translate to gray, and when the red is completely gone the enemy team will switch into “suppressed” mode and take a huge hit to their aggressiveness, accuracy, and intelligence. This basically gives the player the chance he needs to either find better cover, or a way to out-maneuver the enemy and take them down.

Of course, this entire system sounds needlessly complex – that is, until the squad control interface is introduced. Over time, the player is given control of multiple fire teams that he can order around Republic Commando-style, which are meant to be use as aids to spot, suppress, and ultimately eliminate enemy positions. Fire teams can be controlled through a simple, intuitive interface accessed by holding down the left trigger, which will bring up a cursor which, when placed at any plot of land, will cause the selected squad to advance up to that point and automatically make use of any cover nearby. This interface is also meant to be used to focus fire on a single enemy team’s position (by releasing the cursor over an enemy squad’s suppression indicator), which frees the player up for other duties. As a final element to this, the “back” button can be pushed at any time to pause the action and access the “Situational Awareness” view, which offers a top-down, adjustable camera of the action so players unfamiliar with the terrain can best figure out how to get themselves out of a sticky mess. It seems a little like a cheap trick to get around the game’s occasionally rough difficulty curve, but I found this lapse in realism quite acceptable in the absence of the kinds of awareness tools a real squadron leader would have at his disposal in the field.

All of this fancy stuff makes for a surprisingly unique and interesting experience, and is something I feel will draw in FPS gamers sick of just randomly running around shooting at Nazis. Because the player is now forced to seek cover and out-maneuver his opponents rather than simply charging head-on into the fray, as well as make full use of his AI buddies in order to stand a chance of progressing, Brothers in Arms manages to separate itself from the competition and is definitely one neat game to play. Scripted sequences, while not quite as elaborate as those the Medal of Honor series is famous for, still keep the action semi-dynamic and interesting, as one minute you could be assaulting a small village, and the next asked to hold the line against an enemy counter-attack. Then suddenly it’s off to a nearby field to deal with a mortar team before they blow your squad into kibbles, and so on. The individual missions are presented with a variety of interesting objectives (such as blowing up an array of poles so American gliders can land in nearby fields, or escorting a tank – completely with a usable machinegun turret – through an enemy village), and the maps are open-ended enough that the player usually has more than one approach to dealing with a particular situation, allowing for lots of satisfying moments when a plan goes off perfectly.

Sadly, like any other title, Brothers in Arms has its share of gameplay faults. As is my typical ranting point for console games (maybe I should just learn to shut up and start liking it), Brothers in Arms relies exclusively upon a checkpoint-based save system. These checkpoints are fairly common, but because the gameplay is so much more slower-paced than the typical shooter, the consequences of dying can be a lot more severe in the form of wasted time and effort. The loading times for each mission are also somewhat on the lengthy side (this is offset by neat little animated loading screens), which drove me nuts because the game felt the need to re-load the entire level every time I died. Have I mentioned lately how much I hate doing things over again? The squad control system also becomes slightly unwieldy during engagements encompassing large plots of land, forcing the player to consistently backtrack to redirect his squads with precision because there’s no way for the player to tell his team to move to a plot of land he can’t directly see, which would be useful for trying to pull off certain maneuvers such as a multi-pronged attack around the side of a building (and the way the allegedly “intelligent” AI sometimes decided that standing out in the open would be better than using the object right next to him for cover didn’t help). And I’m not sure if this is through intentional design or simple absent-minded development, but the “Situational Awareness” screen is sometimes incredibly difficult to manipulate properly because the camera gets stuck on what effectively constitutes the edges of the map and refuses to rotate any further, often giving the player only a very limited and narrow perspective on the action. Again, perhaps this is an intentional gameplay quirk to help give the “fog of war” effect, but I commonly just found it annoying, and sometimes it even defeated the purpose of the Situational Awareness screen because I couldn’t see well enough to find a tactical solution to my current problem. A few black marks against an otherwise solidly-built title, but nothing sufficient to really ruin the experience (unless you’re the kind of player who gets frustrated easily).

Brothers in Arms’ graphics approach is adequate, although not revolutionary – everything in the game has an appealing, realistic feel to it, with gritty textures, appealing town designs, and, of course, the prerequisite sizable explosions, but the game also lacks many of the advanced, flashy special effects one would expect from a modern action title. That isn’t to say that the game looks terrible by any account, but gamers expecting a breakthrough in graphical goodness might find themselves a bit disappointed. That said, the map sizes are still fairly large (especially for a console game, where I’ve begun to expect loading points around every corner on average) and the models look impressive, particularly the weapons, which have some really nice looking iron sights. But whether it’s the AI, the map sizes, or some other unknown process running under the hood, something manages to do a good job of bogging the game down on occasion, resulting in a severe slowdown in framerates when the action heated up. It was hardly common (in fact, I only witnessed it a couple of times), but very noticeable when it did occur. Otherwise, I have no other major comments on Brothers in Arms’ graphical system, aside from declaring it “good, but not jaw-dropping”.

As for the game’s multiplayer goodies, Brothers in Arms has decided to forgo the generic deathmatch / capture the flag modes most games tend to ship with in favor of an objective-based gameplay type that capitalizes on the game’s strengths. Multiplayer in Brothers in Arms allows up to four players to compete over splitscreen, System Link, or an Xbox Live connection in a variety of 2-on-2 scenarios. The game’s objective-based maps face both German and American forces against one another in a variety of roles, but the neat part is that players are tasked with using an AI-controlled squad to back them up and provide support – much like in the singleplayer campaign. The multiplayer UI is quite nicely designed (a fresh breath of air after my experience with Project: Snowblind), although I wasn’t able to find any notification indicator on if a match had actually begun already or not, meaning I inadvertently ended up stuck in spectator mode for a number of sessions I joined until the action ended. But while the game’s multiplayer mode offers quite a bit of intriguing tactical fun (especially thanks to the ability to bring a buddy online in splitscreen mode), I still managed to find a few snags. First off, the game’s netcode is incredibly finicky, and on more than one occasion I ran into situations where I shot a guy several times in the face with no obvious effect, or died from incoming fire that seemingly came from nowhere. This also resulted in jerky animations and the occasional teleporting / jumpy player model, which is always a no-no for games heavily reliant on pinpoint shooting. Finally though, the AI’s accuracy and awareness seemed to be a bit too overstated in multiplayer, and sometimes I’d poke my head around a corner for less than half a second and end up watching my corpse bounce across the ground as the result of an impossible headshot.

I’m more than satisfied with the time I invested into checking this game out. It may not be the most revolutionary or exceptional title in existence, but it has a level of quality I can confidently declare “better than most”, and the clever mixture of shooty-shooty action and tactical thinking makes the game’s singleplayer campaign a fun, if somewhat brief experience – and the multiplayer support doesn’t hurt either (although I feel compelled to whine, as usual, about a lack of co-op play). In closing, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is a nice contribution to the WW2 shooter genre that fans will find to be a refreshing experience – definitely one game worth checking out.