Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30

Added April 6th, 2005 by Kisan Parikh

Introduction:

The latest WWII first person shooter for Xbox aims to be the most realistic shooter to date. Based on a true story, the game throws you into the experiences of Matt Baker, a D-day paratrooper responsible for the lives of 13 fellow soldiers. The game implements authentic tactics and firing procedures. Real photos were used to develop the environments. Let’s take a look at how well employed the game’s innovative new features are, and let’s also look to see if Brothers in Arms is too realistic to be fun.

Gameplay:

The single player campaign of Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is easily the game’s main mode of play. In this mode of play, you play the role of Matt Baker as he carries out his missions on the French countryside. After an ingenious segment to launch the story, you are thrown straight into the middle of a D-day mission. The cut scenes are interactive right from the start, and this makes you feel as if you are right there in the middle of the action.

The basic maneuvers of the game include the normal running, jumping, crouching, and shooting that we have come to expect in first person shooters. One twist to this is that there are no crosshairs on the default settings. This is just one of the tweaks made to this game to make it as realistic as possible. Due to the lack of crosshairs, aiming must be done through the iron sights. I thought this was a particularly nice touch, because it makes standard first person shooter techniques a bit more challenging to pull off. For instance, strafing while shooting is much more difficult in Brothers in Arms because you cannot use crosshairs to aim, and aiming down the iron sight slows you down. This, in conjunction with the fact that you are not accurate while moving (and to some extent while standing), makes for a much more strategic game.

Another element of the game that adds to its strategic style of play is the incredible squad control system. The fate of fellow soldiers is in your hands, because their movements, firing, and charges are all controlled by you. The AI of your squad mates is fantastic. General area orders can be given without the soldiers running into areas without cover. If ordered to fire, your soldiers will either focus their fire on the desired target, or verbally communicate improper positioning. The rushing technique is the riskiest, and involves running head on towards your enemies.

Using your fire teams, you can execute authentic World War II tactics. Mainly, you will use flanking as your main weapon against the enemy. As taught to you during the first few levels, flanking consists of suppressing the enemy with your fire team, and then moving to a spot behind or to the side of your adversary to effortlessly pick them off. While sometimes the path to take is obvious, most missions provide decisions to make. The game is not always the easiest, because you will sometimes be faced with large amounts of smart AI.

Outsmarting this smart AI is sometimes difficult, and could leave some gamers a bit frustrated. Finding ways around hoards of troops and a machine gun is tricky, and that is why patience is definitely important in this game, as it is in real life combat. Those looking for a run and gun shooter game will definitely become annoyed by this game, because, most of the time, planning attacks will provide much better results than quick trigger fingers.

One of your main tools during the course of the single player missions is your compass. The compass not only reveals location relative to fire teams and objectives, but also uses a yellow ring surrounding the compass to show distance from these objects. This is one of the reasons why your compass will be one of your favorite tools in the game. Another useful tool in the game is called Situational Awareness View. This view allows you to pause the gameplay and kick out to a view of the entire battlefield. The view is limited to known objectives, enemy holdings, and your current position. This is supposed to imitate a soldier’s knowledge of his drop zone because of maps and prior preparation.

The weapons in the game feel as authentic as possible in a video game. The range, power, and weight of the guns could be “felt” while playing. By felt I mean that you could really tell how each gun was used in World War II and you could differentiate each weapon’s distinct advantages over another. This meant that there was no single dominant rifle in the game. Sure, you could discover which worked best for your style of play, but generally speaking, each gun had different applications.

What really worked for the gameplay of Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 was its ability to create a gameplay that had enough well executed innovative features to make it fun for gamers who feel that they have played every possible style of first person shooters. I enjoyed the pace and style of the game, but I am concerned that people who love “quickest trigger wins” style games will become frustrated with the strategy style of play. By no means am I saying that you will not get to fire your gun enough, I just think that as great as the gameplay is, it might not be fun for every type of gamer. This said, I am positive that anyone who likes this type of play will completely love Brothers in Arms’ gameplay.

Graphics:

The visuals in Brothers in Arms are one of the game’s most standout aspects. With gorgeous environments that were created from photographs taken during the war, you get a sense of what the war was really like. The player models are excellent examples of the game’s incredible look. Each character is incredibly realistic, and everything from eyes that follow you to great animations has been included. The animations made the characters come alive, and the death animations are spectacular. For instance, when shooting an enemy down at the right location, he will realistically fall onto low walls and similar objects. Another strong aspect of the graphics was the visual effects. Some of my favorites included blood and dirt splattering onto your screen.

Audio:

Audio was yet another fantastic addition to the game. The voice acting was great, and was really believable in the setting of the game. Although there was a slightly limited amount of during battle chit-chat, there were always good conversations between soldiers at other times. The voice acting was also strong in the narrations before missions. The voice of Matt Baker in the game truly seems like the voice of someone who has been through similar circumstances. Another aspect of the sound that was impressive was the weapon sounds. The sound of your weapon really helps add to the “feel” that I described earlier. One thing I noticed was that there was directional sound as well. Depending on which way you are facing and how far away you are, sounds get louder and softer. Overall, I thought that the audio aspect of the game was yet another strong point.

Controls:

The controls in Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 are very easy to learn, and become natural pretty quickly. With a tutorial in game to help you along, you will find that the seemingly complex squad controls are very simple. The left trigger and right thumbstick pretty much control all of these controls. This is great because I feel that if the controls in this game were not close to perfect, it would have taken quite a bit away from the gameplay.

Replay:

Aside from having an incredible single player campaign that is quite long, Brothers in Arms also has a well thought out multiplayer mode. There are 10 maps, and each of these maps has a single objective. Your goal will either be carrying out this objective or preventing the other team from doing so. The gameplay style is similar to that of the single player, except now you are facing humans and have the opportunity to play the other role. The multiplayer will provide tons of fun hours with this game, and can be played on either Xbox Live or split screen.

Summary:

Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is one of the most complete on Xbox, and it is easily the best World War II shooter that has ever been released. With everything including innovative and fun gameplay, amazing visuals, great sound, simple control scheme, and enormous replay value, this game should make its way to the home of anyone who enjoys strategy shooters. Those who are more into run and gun games should give the game a trial run, but I am sure that the majority of these people will love the game as well.