Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30 - Review

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  • Platform: PC
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The reputation earned by Medal Of Honor and Call of Duty, together with their relatives (add-ons, sequels, prequels and all the others) is so great, that every time you tell somebody you started a new WWII inspired game, the first question will always be: "Is it better than MOHAA/COD?"

Even the Gearbox team (the one in charge of the game's development) asked the same question: Can we develop a better/more interesting game than the last two well known titles?" And I guess they realized they need a new perspective.

Reinventing the concepts of realism

In MOHAA you played the role of a mini-Rambo who bore the responsibility for winning the war. It was very clear that if you were not able to shoot all the Nazis from landing until Berlin, the Allies will suffer greatly from your failures and the whole continent will speak German..

Call Of Duty took the concept a little bit further and included the player into an assault group. But besides giving orders and providing cover fire, the assault group didn't take notice of you.

Well, in Brothers in Arms: Road To Hill 30 it's all about the team. Therefore, if you are one of those players who likes going alone after 3 dozens of Nazis and 5-6 tanks you will abandon Brothers in Arms : Road to Hill 30 after the first two levels, when you realize that war is not a "shoot everyone and run for your life" type of business.

In Brothers in Arms: Road To Hill 30 there are no medkits, health packs or other similar resources and that is because Brothers In Arms is counting mainly on realism. You will see that many of the options we were accustomed were left out.

If you never liked the role of a team leader, then you have another reason for not playing this game, because in Brothers in Arms: Road To Hill 30 everything is focused around this notion.

The gamer who thinks: "OK, I'll just give them some orders and then I'll go slaughter all the enemies", won't make it to the building where the Germans fortified and target you with two or three machineguns.

Don't be discouraged by that fact that you will not be in the center of attention, because, despite being different in concept from everything you have ever seen/played, Brother in Arms: Road to Hill 30 has all the qualities for becoming the game of the year.

8 days in hell

In Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, you play the part of Sergeant Matt Baker from the 101st Airborne who is parachuted in Normandy to prepare the famous D-Day. For 8 days, Matt Baker and his comrades will fight for every road, little town or fortified position met in their way. They will be one of the cogs in the mechanism which has to assure the success of the landing.

From his position as a leader, Matt Baker will have to coordinate the actions of every man on his team and this is where the strategic aspect of the game comes in; you will have to obey the rule of the 4 Fs: Find, Fix, Flank, Finish.

In their chase for realism, Gearbox decided that taking out the enemies is not a matter of who sees who first and gets to fire faster and with a deadlier weapon, but as a result of the combined actions of the whole team.

Hence, to eliminate your enemies, you must first find them (Find), then order cover fire (Fix), find the best way to reach your target (alone or with the rest of your team within the Flank operation) and then eliminate any resistance (Finish).

On the other hand, don't think you can leave all the dirty work to your comrades and keep a low profile using your position as a team commander, because no matter how much cover fire your team is providing, they won't be able to take out all the enemies.

After you have located the enemy and before applying the 4F rule, it is necessary to use Gearbox's most important innovation: Situational Awareness View. This viewing mode of the battle will "freeze" the action and you will be able to see the enemy's position in detail and the location of your comrades.

Although many will say that this looks like a cheat, this Situational Awareness View doesn't reveal the enemy positions or the path you have to follow to annihilate enemy soldiers. Considering that you can only place you team only in visible areas, you must choose your own path.

You have a limited number of approaches to solve a conflict which induces the game a linear evolution. And if you don't choose the right one you will get shot.

The status of the enemy is signaled by red markers placed above the location and if cover fire is sufficient and the enemies are intimidated, the color will turn grey. That is the moment to attack.

Although Baker's comrades are well controlled by AI and have sufficient personal initiative, it doesn't happen too often to actually kill the enemies, this task belonging to the sergeant.

During missions in the game, you will have to achieve several objectives, like mining bridges, taking out German resistance points in cities, conquering buildings; you will also have allied tank support. In the missions you will control tanks, don't rely on its invulnerability. Before sending it to execute a certain maneuver, it is recommended to check the perimeter for enemy tanks or Nazis with panzerfausts because otherwise you will quickly restart the mission.

Death is something normal

As I was saying, in Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, there are no survival kits, so get used to the idea of dying very often. It takes only a few well placed bullets and you will find yourself at the beginning of the level.

That's OK, you'll say. We will save often. Saves won't be at the player's disposal because Gearbox introduced checkpoints where the game is automatically saved.

Considering that the most difficult objectives are generally placed far away from the checkpoint, you will restart a mission many times and you'll have the opportunity to think where to buy a new keyboard and a new mouse after destroying the last ones when you got shot by the last enemy at your last objective.

Unlike other squad-control based games where the player has the opportunity of controlling other characters, in Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, Matt Baker's death means the end of the mission.

And as it's up to Baker to take out the enemies, you will either become a shooting expert or you will learn that rushing in the middle of the Germans and taking them out won't do the trick in this game.

And for a closer to reality experience, Gearbox Software eliminated the aiming system, the well known cross-hair (not entirely, not active in standard mode), so you'll rely only on your weapon's sight to shoot.

The weapons are the ones fro every war game: Thompson, BAR, M1 Garand, Sniper Rifle, and so on. If you don't like these you can use the weapons of your enemies.

Besides these, there are also grenades which won't make a big difference, because you won't be able to tell your comrade to throw a grenade, he will use it when he sees fit to.

Even so, the soldier actions are well controlled by the AI and you won't have the surprise of being shot in the back or sending them in a certain position and arriving 3 hours later. The game's realism is decreased by the fact that no matter how many comrades die during the mission, at the beginning of the new mission they will be alive and willing to start over. This will decrease your concern about their lives during the game.

Aiming is a whole different story. Without a crosshair, you will need a lot of accuracy, obtained only in static positions as: kneeling or lying on the ground which will slow your moving speed. Moreover, after a few game levels, you will find out that, sometimes, the enemies are tougher than Bruce Willis in Die Hard. Sometimes, not even a bullet to the head will kill them, a second one being required.

To enjoy the most out of Gearbox's game you'll have to play without the damage indicators or the crosshair. Then, you will experience war as it was experienced by the real soldiers.

Walking through France

The graphics of the game is very good, even though, not as good the one offered by COD or MOHAA. Gearbox Software insisted a lot on accuracy. The scenery during the 8 days of battle is well documented as you will from the bonuses.

Matt Baker's comrades look very real and all the details of weapons and uniforms are in place. It's easy to see that Gearbox benefited from the consultancy of colonel Antal of the American army (his involvement could be seen in the interludes between the missions as well as in the bonuses you will unlock by finishing the missions). Similar to the Band of Brothers (which the game owes a lot), the makers talked to the people who fought in those days.

From that point of view, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is one of the first games which fully understood that war is violence and blood, so you will have the opportunity to see some scenery rarely seen in COD and MOHAA. There is a level where you will pass through the remains of an assault team annihilated by Stukas. You'll see there the real meaning of blood in a war game.

The feeling of realism is also emphasized by the destroyed buildings and the abandoned equipment.

To fully enjoy the scenery, try to play with as many options activated as possible, even if the game run swell at smaller resolutions with fewer details. If the wall behind which you hide doesn't look as a real one, at least it shields you from bullets.

To get the most out of the scenery, the background music is only present during mission interludes and cinematics. During the game, the only things you will hear will be the bullets and your comrades indicating the position of the enemy. Gearbox met their goal of making feel like you were there.

The lines exchanged by Matt Baker with his comrades are a little bit to dull and Baker's voice tone is kind of gloomy. Truth is that the indifference of the fearless hero wasn't a solution either, but Matt Baker talks as if he is going to die as soon as he sets foot on the battle field. Unlike other war games, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is abundant in coarse language (the game was rated M by ERSB), but adds to the game's realism.

Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 multiplayer mode

Since Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is all about innovations, the multiplayer mode doesn't make an exception and is based on a total different concept than other games in its segment. So don't expect deathmatch or capture the flag because the multiplayer mode only supports 2 - 4 players, of which some have to reach some goals and the others have to prevent them from reaching them.

Boring, might say the ones accustomed to a 32 player crowded map. Not exactly, if you take into account that every player controls a group of soldiers which he can command as he likes.

Considering that guiding your comrades is not very complicated, the combination of real time strategy and FPS leads to an exciting multiplayer mode. Unlike the single-player mode, where, once Baker dies the game ends, in multiplayer you can take control of another character and the game goes on until the mission is completed or all the soldiers die.

There is still room for improvement, because the whole idea of a team attacking and the other defending can get monotonous after a few multiplayer missions.

The end of the battle!

Once you get to the end of the game, you will find out two things: that you are a very patient man (woman) if you didn't abandon after dying dozens or hundreds of times and that Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is an innovative game capable of offering you 20 hours of interesting experiences. Unfortunately, given the linearity of the scenarios, you won't feel like starting it all over again.

But the satisfaction is even greater, since Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is anything but an easy game. The game's innovations make it different from all the other games of this kind and until the next version, Gearbox Software will have the opportunity to improve it.

Compared to the other runandgun games, as most WWII FPS are, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 has all the chances to interest strategy enthusiasts, as well as those who like playing a realistic game based on the second world war.

Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 offers a whole new image and this could be its chance to make a statement in a domain where no new concepts have been brought for quite some time now.

Graphics: 9 Audio: 8 Gameplay: 9 Concept: 10 General impression: 9 SOFTPEDIA MARK: 9

Official Site: http://www.brothersinarmsgame.com/us

Minimum requirements: System: 1 GHz Pentium III or Athlon RAM: 512 MB RAM Video memory: 32 MB VRAM HDD: 5000 MB DVD-ROM: 8X DVD-ROM Others: GF4 MX NOT supported

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multiplayer 0
final rating 0
Editor's review
poor