Operation Market Garden: the greatest airborne campaign in history. That’s right, this time it’s Nazis we’re shooting. The German army routs eastward, chased through the Netherlands by the surviving veteran cast of Brothers in Arms. Like Road to Hill 30 and Earned in Blood before it, Hell’s Highway offers a true-to-life insight and recreation of this campaign, placing the player not only in an authentic first-person shooting experience, but also an engrossing cinematic display, tying up the loose ends in the story of Staff Sergeant Matt Baker.
In contrast to its predecessors, which were all but identical, Hell’s Highway overturns some of the gameplay features of typical Brothers in Arms, introducing (or rather, borrowing) a cover and health system similar to that of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas. Upgraded AI encourages defensive tactics in addition to the flanking methods required previously, and relieving the stress of strategic headaches with brief tank commanding sessions.
Despite boasting of a heightened emphasis on strategy and tactics, alterations to both teams AI are virtually unnoticeable, and the need for tactical planning only picks its feet up after a portion of the game, giving you a good head start for running and gunning. The map design however is generally well thought out, entertaining multiple strategies and manoeuvres, letting both the player and his enemies think for themselves, and fight a battle of wits, while in other cases each fire fight is a military puzzle for the player to solve. The game offers a generous range in levels, laced with solo and vehicular sections between variable paces of reliable squad based shooting, and is also built on a varying foundation of settings, be it burning buildings and creepy hospitals, or country roads and rural villages.
Brothers in Arms is a visual feast, treating the player to a first-person view through natural and convincing camera movements during seamless cinematics, taking a stern attention to detail and creating remarkably life-like special effects. The graphical capability of the game is not always done justice by the wartime setting, as while I may have taken a moment to admire the thatched roofs and apple trees of one sunny afternoon, the game’s dark ditches and rubble are difficult to describe as pretty. Hell’s Highway introduces slow motion camera zooms for events such as headshots and explosions from the new bazooka team - which by any means is not as remarkable as the violent spotlight moments in games like Fallout 3 and Stranglehold, but is enjoyable enough to render it’s infrequency a disappointment.
As for the story aspect of Hell’s Highway, the teatime soap-opera played out between missions is largely laughable. What could have been, and once was, a poignant war-time drama following a company of soldiers through a historically accurate picture of the Second World War has become a callow imagination over a cursed hand-gun and the psychological abnormalities of once believable characters. Although it is nice to see dedication to the story of the original titles, the respectful and appreciative treatment of historical background appears to have been lost, and our first-person experience of the Brothers in Arms story is almost completely lost when the character we play becomes exotic and unfamiliar.
Despite its uninspired plotline, unoriginal gameplay and borrowed innovations, Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway is a solid and reliable squad based shooter, nice to look at, and should please the average tactically minded FPS player.
Format: PS3, Xbox 360, PC (version played) Dev: Gearbox Software Pub: Ubisoft Out: 10/10/08 Players: 1, 2-24 online
