Video Games Today

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway is the latest Brothers in Arms by Gearbox and Ubisoft. Brothers in Arms brings the same tactical shooter as it's predecessors. If you're looking for a Call of Duty or Halo "run and gun", pass this on your to buy list.

Brothers in arms puts you in the role of Staff Sergeant Matt Baker who is part of the 101st Airborne Division. You start off the game in a fast forward where you talk to a soldier who's face is not shown. The game goes into a short tutorial to show you the basics and necessities, such as suppressing fire and flanking maneuvers.

The game controls are solid and can be changed to different layouts such as "Call of Duty 4", "Halo 3", and "Rainbow 6" for people that want to use a familiar style. This game builds off of the cover system that Ubisoft uses in most of it's FPS games. You can take cover behind nearly everything, but things like wood will not hold up as well. The cracking effects on wood cover are great, the wood does not just spontaneously combust like many other games, it chips away until the enemy, or you, have destroyed it all.



One major issue with the cover system is the lack of blind fire. You must reveal yourself to the enemy to shoot. And this will often hurt your squad more than you. They will stand straight up in the middle of a fire fight and shoot at the enemy, just to see a bullet aimed at their head.

Hell's Highway has been significantly "dulled" down from previous Brothers in Arms, in terms of the micro management of your squads. Flanking is still useful, and needed in harder difficulties and battles, but you find that you could more easily flank the enemy yourself while your squads try to figure out the cover system.



The major down point of this game is the replay factor. When you start the game you have a choice of easy or medium difficulty, you must beat the game once to get the hard difficulty. This is a turn off to me. Why can't I play the game how I want to first time around. It seems like Gearbox is trying to juice as many hours of playtime out of you before you realize that this game gets old after the first play through. Another sign of this is the achievement list. Instead of having achievements for beating the game on the highest difficultly like in the Call of Duty series. Instead they throw in the series of achievements for amount of days played. Like play the game for 7 days, the for 30 days, etc. In addition to the "Remember September '44" in which you must wait until September 17th of next year to achieve.

Along with lack of single player replayability, the multiplayer falls far short of expectations of FPS games. The multiplayer only has one mode with release, and not plans of yet for more to be added via DLC or patch. The single mode is a form of Capture the Flag. The Brothers in Arms games are good and known for their strategic shooter genre, with micro managing squads. In the multiplayer, Gearbox tries to bring that but falls short. The mutltiplayer has assigned "Team Captains", "Assualt Team", etc. The problem is that the team doesnt have to listen to the Captain, and that makes the captain useless.

Overall, a solid game with some replay problems and lack of a stable multiplayer. This game will make the fans of the series a bit disappointed in it's dulled down nature, but for the casual shooter fan it is great.

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway gets a:
B
Pass -- Rent -- Buy