I Never Asked to be Squad Leader

With Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, players are reintroduced to Sgt. Matthew Baker, a paratrooper squad leader in the 101st and survivor of the Normandy invasion. While he may have come out of the Normandy campaign in one piece, he didn't quite make it out intact. Burdened by the deaths of several of his comrades, Baker is slowly starting to go insane from the constant fear for the lives of his men and from his hatred of his supposedly "cursed" pistol with which everyone who has ever wielded it has died. The game even incorporates this beyond just cinematic sequences. It is not uncommon for Baker to get flashbacks of his departed friends while alone or even seeing their ghosts fighting alongside you just a few yards away.

The game occurs during the daring September 1944 campaign dubbed Operation Market Garden, in which American paratroopers dropped into Holland to secure key bridges across the Rhine and, with British armor support, hopefully create a highway right into the heart of Germany. Those who are aware of their modern history probably know what happened next. After the paratroopers dropped in, chaos ensued with missed deployment points for the British. The Germans counterattacked and forced the Allies to withdraw after nine days of torrential fighting. The events of those nine days came to be known as Hell's Highway.

The events of the game follow Baker and his men through those nine days and the end result is nothing short of being stellar. The story is the best part of the entire Brothers in Arms experience and, thanks to the power of the Unreal 3 engine, is a visual feast. Watching Matt Baker slowly begin his descent into madness is startling and parallels some of the best television shows and movies of the past twenty years. There are no unimportant characters in the story either; every person in the game is fleshed out and they all feel like actual people. In keeping with Gearbox's devotion to creating a realistic experience, everyone ranked lieutenant or higher was an actual person who was involved in those locations and times. When a character dies no one is left unaffected by their death and by the time you get to the end of the tale you will feel similarly affected.

Corrion, Get to That Cover!
Gearbox Software, while being in the business to entertain and make money, prides itself in creating a realistic experience that few other developers have ever been able to accomplish. Unlike the Call of Duty and Medal of Honor series that have been more about creating cinematic moments than a realistic depiction of what transpired, the Brothers in Arms series devotes itself to balancing fun with realism. The end result does indeed meet such a balance and is never tiring.

Hell's Highway incorporates the same type of squad tactics that were employed by the Allies and the Germans in World War II. Called "fire and maneuver", the rules of engagement usually involve two or more teams. One team, dubbed the fire team, would take up a position and provide a base of fire to suppress the enemy with. When the enemy has been suppressed, another team, dubbed the assault team, would maneuver around to a position at the enemy's flank and wipe them out in the ensuing confusion. Roughly 90% of the Brothers in Arms experience has worked this way with the small exception of the main character going off alone or with the addition of armor support such as tanks.

 Fire Teams

Hell's Highway adds to this formula with the introduction of a third fire team and different variations thereof. Whereas the first two games in the series only involved fire and assault teams and the occasional tank, this latest addition introduces the machine gun team, armed with a fearsome .30 Browning M1919, and the bazooka team. The Bazooka team is especially handy in situations in which your squad is pinned down by enemy fire from a weak cover position. As you would expect, this team can destroy light cover such as sandbags and vehicles.

While your fire teams will be doing almost all of the suppression fire on the German positions, at least 50% of the kills will come from the player. You will often find yourself in positions in which moving a team will get your men killed and thus requires you to take out the enemy. The controls are simple and don't take much time to learn even though it does not adopt the standard Halo scheme. Commanding your squad is done with a pull of the left trigger and directing it at either a position or an enemy squad to fire upon.

While the campaign is an excellent experience to have, there is one critical area that really detracts from the overall Hell's Highway experience: the multiplayer component. While there is a fair amount of different maps available, most games are plagued with lag and there is only one mode to play. I'm sorry, but I was under the impression that a deathmatch mode was a staple of the first person shooter. Overall the multiplayer experience feels very tacked on at the last minute and isn't worth playing for long. With two collection features to find throughout the game and a hard mode that completely removes the HUD, the replay value is increased somewhat, but it would have helped if the multiplayer would have received more attention.

Pushing The Front Forward

As the third entry in the franchise it is almost a requirement to create new gameplay elements and refine others that came before it. Several of these new features are anything but refined, as many have become staples of this generation. The first of which is one that is almost always present in a shooter nowadays: a cover system. The cover system could not be much simpler and involves walking over to an object and pressing a button. Controls for being in cover are actually better than most games however, as peaking out of cover is devoted to the left analog stick and the aiming on the right stick, whereas most other shooters devote it pretty much to the right stick. The addition of the cover system really changes things from the methods established previously in the series and strongly aids in tackling tough objectives.

Another new gameplay element is destructible cover. Objects such as fences, carts, and sandbag walls, previously all but invincible to even tank fire, can now be taken out depending on the material they are built with. As stated before, certain objects can only be taken out by explosives but a good majority of cover such as picket fences and wooden walls can be destroyed by gunfire. There are still objects that for some reason or another are invulnerable, such as some brick walls, but it is not a game killer.

Hell's Highway abandons the health bar in favor of the typical Call of Duty health regeneration system. It seems that Gearbox understands the lack of realism in having such a system (logically I shouldn't be able to finish a level after being hit by two hundred bullets) and has added a twist. Instead of allowing you to be a living repository for enemy fire, the game incorporates a 'one shot one kill' policy to players. When the screen begins to turn red, it is not an indication that the player is getting hit but rather that he is exposed and is drawing fire. When the screen has turned completely red and black you get shot and die right there. This works well and we wouldn't mind seeing this in other games.

The final addition to the game doesn't change the gameplay so much as make it more entertaining. Upon certain events like a devastating headshot or an explosion taking place at an enemy position, the camera will zoom in on that position and slows down everything, allowing the player to take in what has just happened. The result isn't that much different from the bullet time effect that was made popular by Max Payne but it is still entertaining every single time. The effect occurs at random times but you won't find yourself wishing you could speed through it.

The Roar of Windmills Aflame

While a game always gets high marks for a good story, sadly it is the graphics that more often than not decide the fate of most games. Luckily, Hell's Highway takes this category head on and comes out smiling. Gearbox chose to utilize the ever impressive Unreal 3 engine to get the job done and shows some excellent eye candy. While there are certain polish issues that are seen throughout the game, such as certain rubble textures and some last-gen grass models, you find yourself immersed by the visuals. The game experiences some drops in framerate on occasion but otherwise works out just fine for most of the game.

The biggest visual highlights are the flames seen on almost everything in sight. Put quite simply, what Bioshock was to water effects, Hell's Highway is to fire. The visual design of many of the levels is great and really throws you into a hellish situation. The titular level of the game, set toward the end of the campaign, is filled with both visual splendor and is genuinely creepy. There's just something genuinely scary about seeing windmills and other farm buildings on fire with the ruins of a convoy lying in ruin and not knowing where the Germans are.

The modeling of the characters is quite well done. No two people in Baker's squad (or on the Allies' side for that matter) look the same. There are a few variations in the German models but you aren't going to be focusing on those very often. The facial expressions on Baker, Frankie, Corrion, and Hartsock are particularly well animated with Baker standing out. Watching Baker's face twist and contort in sorrow and rage tells you more about his current state of mind than words could ever convey.

Violence

Gearbox's attention to detail is exceptional. The game really captures the feel of 1944 Holland and in more than just scenery. Gearbox went out of their way in the recreation of Eindhoven. Using city maps and descriptions from both civilian and veterans, Gearbox recreated the city to within a foot of where everything actually was. All the building designs, store locations, roads, and landmarks are exactly as they were during Operation Market Garden. Short of a golf game, Gearbox has done one of the most remarkable recreations ever done in a videogame.

One graphical change that is fairly surprising to see is the amount of violence as Hell's Highway is loaded with gore. It is not uncommon to see limbs blown off at their joints or heads explode at the impact of a bullet. Severed legs and arms show the exposed bones and muscle from the wound and heads are nothing short of a bloody mess. It really gives you a sense of the horrors seen by those who were there.

The audio portion of the game has some very authentic sound effects. The music is your typical sweeping World War II suite with everything kicking in at just the right moment. The voice acting is superb and obviously uses well experienced voice actors. Troy Baker's presentation of the game's main character is very emotional and does tug on the heartstrings. Your squad mates always have something useful to say and the dialogue takes a long time before it starts getting too repetitive.

Remember the Fallen

Brothers in Arms is an excellent example of taking what could have been another typical first person shooter and adding just enough refinements to be one of the best on the market. While Hell's Highway's multiplayer component is something you should all but steer clear of. The campaign is an excellent fictional narrative set within an all too realistically depicted battlefield. This one's going to be with me for a long time.