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> Results: Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30
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If you're a shooter fan, the gaming market has sort of been like your personal little heaven for the last decade, hasn't it? All genres have seen some technological advances, but while adventures and simulations have fallen to obscurity, shooters are stronger than ever and are driving factors for new technology. The World War II theme infused all kinds of new blood into the genre, and each new franchise introduces something new. Medal of Honor brought contemporary respect to the historical shooter. Call of Duty added a sense of teamwork. Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is here now, and it takes the squad concept to yet another level.
Shortly into the game's tutorial video, you realize that Brothers in Arms is a special new franchise. The shooter part includes everything you've seen before. There are different authentic WWII weapons to use, an "aiming with the iron sights" mode, and a whole pile of German soldiers to shoot down. But the game really distinguishes itself in the categories of teamwork and artificial intelligence (AI).  Gearbox Software put the Unreal engine to great work and added several layers of depth. The graphics feature excellent detail. Noteworthy are the human characters, all of whom have eerily realistic eyes and facial expressions and benefit from strong voice acting. The AI gives each a bit of personality too and some will chat with your character. Sidle up by one during a peaceful moment, and sometimes he'll spout some one-liners. Try the same thing during combat, and he'll say, "Later! We'll talk later!" The most impressive interaction comes with the commands your character can order to the squad. The influence of Colonel John Antal (US Army, Ret.) is obvious and leads to an emphasis on the infantry tactics of using suppressant fire and flanking. For the first time that I can remember in a shooter, you're taught that sometimes it's acceptable to shoot and not necessarily hit someone. Your goal can legitimately be to simply keep their heads down. Your character starts out as a subordinate to a higher ranking soldier in the beginning, but eventually picks up enough teammates to have control of two squads, and can request each to suppress or assault a position. The squads obey dutifully and are also good communicators. If they're successful in suppressing the enemy, they'll declare something like, "We've got them pinned!" or if they having trouble attacking the designated target, will say, "Can't do it, sir!" Commands are easily given using the mouse and a context sensitive cursor that accurately knows when you're designating a movement destination or a shooting target. Patient players can still rely on sharp-shooting skills to get through most of the game's challenges, but using the team appropriately is very rewarding, as is keeping the squads alive. Each person in the squad has a name and your character often refers to them by name when giving commands. Squad mates call to each other by name when one is hit by the enemy. All of this adds to the sense that these teammates are real people and simulates some of the emotional attachment soldiers feel. Although the AI characters are rejuvenated for the beginning of the next mission, if they are incapacitated in the current one, you feel it a bit more than you might in another game. There's no avoiding the similarities between this game and the Stephen Ambrose book also about the 101st Airborne, Band of Brothers, and it's totally understandable why Gearbox would keep the term "brothers" in the title. Your character, Matt Baker, is a sergeant in a platoon of paratroopers, and Brothers In Arms: Road to Hill 30 follows his team as they're dropped into Normandy and work their way to Carentan. Although Baker and his teammates are fictional characters, the entire adventure derives from true events. All the environments in the game come from locations in France along the same routes the paratroopers took in real life. Many of the battles and locales are based on real WWII engagements, such as Cole's Charge, Purple Heart Lane, and Dead Man's Corner. Some of the non-player characters in the game are real characters, such as the officer in Cole's charge (the real Lt.Col. Robert Cole received a Congressional Medal of Honor for the mission you participate in). Gearbox shares the tremendous research done for the title by including historical notes unlocked after each mission. Other WWII shooters also borrow from real life, but this game does a better job of showing players how their experience simulates specific historical events. The team concept carries over to the multiplayer component too. You enter each game with a character you control, and three AI teammates. Other players on your team also control a squad of four. The multiplayer missions are objective-based maps that can be very challenging and reward players that use the skills they learn in the single-player game. The lack of a deathmatch mode seems curious at first but dovetails with the team oriented aspect of the game. It would have been interesting though to play selected campaign missions cooperatively.  Other fine design touches garnish the game. Enemy troops communicate in German. Some levels feature tanks that you can command, adding the element of combined forces. Players can pick up weapons from fallen teammates or enemies and use them. Tutorial and hint toggles give you a bit of help right when you need it during missions. A selection of meaningful difficulty levels make the game worth replaying several times. The game's great looks work even on mid-range machines (my test system's 1GB RAM is it's only above-average feature, the Pentium 4 2.2 Ghz processor and ATI 8500 video card are approaching three years of age). Sometimes it's tough to tell your squads to move to a place that's not in direct line of sight, and their pathfinding logic sometimes chooses the most direct path instead of the safest one. The tank levels are a nice change of pace, but I found the armor a bit tricky to control, especially when I was trying to do it while manning a turret mounted machine gun (although being able to control the turret machine gun is totally awesome). The tactical depth, thanks to the command system and strong AI, is nice, but battlefields can sometimes be a bit gimmicky. Sometimes the choice of flanking positions comes very naturally and makes sense, other times you'll want to jump a fence to circle around an enemy but instead hit a map boundary or realize that the level has been specifically set up as a puzzle to decipher. The Situational Awareness mode compensates a bit for this. It freezes the action and lets players catch their breath and analyze an overhead view of the battlefield. Gearbox fairly justifies this feature by noting that soldiers in the war had aerial photographs of the locales and used them to construct plans. But being able to direct squads and set waypoints within the Situational Awareness mode would have been handy at times. None of those quirks can take away from Brothers In Arms' greatness. It is one of the rare action titles where innovation is about more than graphics. And that's not knocking the graphics, which are excellent. It's a joy to see AI teammates that know how to use cover and return fire without being told. The character interactions and scripted material add real grit and ambiance to the experience, and the historical extras are so nice that it's a shame they have to be behind locked doors. 
Brothers in Arms is a great game but also an intense experience that can be too much for young children. It's bloody and very violent and the characters aren't shy about cussing. The realism it offers can be very educational, but this is definitely a game for adults and mature teens.
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