Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30

"Band of Brothers in Arms"

Missions/Maps
Mission design is excellent. Then again, they are all taken from real life so no wonder there intelligent. Well with the exception of the last mission which is a little silly...not gonna go into detail but it turns in to you behind enemy lines and having to surmount a force much greater than your own. Generic WW2 movie ending. Bah.

The maps themselves are supposedly accurate to the yard of real world locales in Normandy where the battles actually took place. They are dotted with little touches of life, like birds that scatter at the sound of gun fire or the approach of humans. Dead cows. No dead civilians though? Actually no civilians at all....these areas are like ghost towns. I imagine locals took off during the fighting but....

Houses are fairly detailed, some can be entered, most can't. You spend your time in one basic area of Normandy so the scenery is pretty familiar. It does feel like you are camped out and fighting over the same ground.

Foliage is omnipresent. Earth is rarely even and the maps range from small and linear to an open town. The open town maps are more fun. As the game proceeds you get more guys to control and bigger maps to play in. The system works pretty well creating a soft learning curve.

Every time you complete a mission on a difficulty of normal or higher, you unlock content. I guess this is an incentive to play through the game again for some people but not for me really.

Story
Ok based on true events is the key word here. Based. Please note a lot of stuff based on true events is pretty far removed from the truth. I'm not an expert on the 101st or WW2, but the game pretty much follows what I've seen in Band of Brothers. Even some of the dialogue is uncomfortably close to BoB.

Obviously this game is telling some of the same story as BoB but this comes off so much cheesier. It's not that the voice work is bad, but the writing is pretty corny here. And sadly, the models are not even close to the caliber of Half Life 2 models. Arguably, this is the main problem with the story. Nothing looks natural in terms off the conversation or non-tactical movement in this game. The lip synch doesn't work 3/4 of the time and when it does it's close, but still off. This wouldn't be a problem if you weren't zoomed on guys faces so often, but there it is.

It's really a shame because they were clearly trying for something more, but what they got was spooky animated corpses skirting the uncanny valley and then putting up tents there.

The other interesting thing is that it's clear Gearbox, like many other developers, listened to Valve when they said players liked not hearing themselves talk because you don't have verbal responses to anyone in the game. However during chapter screens between missions, you have lots of sappy crap to say over and over again. It's no joke that your character, and many others will say dramatic (not battle related) lines about 4-5 x.

If I ever here Baker say, "I didn't want to be Sergeant" again I will cry. Really. Weep weep.

Gameplay.
So this is the meat of the game and thankfully it's pretty damn good.

Audio is awesome. Really spot on when it comes to gun fights. Totally puts you in the moment.

AI is pretty decent though there are definitely weird glitches in the release. Most of the time my squad had no problems moving to locations, using cover and suppressing the enemy. However I did find on occasion, I was having my squads follow me only to run into a gun fight, take cover, order suppression and discover they were half a klick behind me still.

I also occasionally set them up on a berm to engage a position only to discover they ran on the wrong side of the berm and then got totally wiped out. Sigh.

Tanks, though you only get them during a few missions of the game, seem to get lost very easily. They are invaluable weapons but you have to micromanage the hell out of them to get them to set up a proper attack...I also noted that sometimes they would simply stop moving, like they forgot my orders and just gave up until fresh orders would be issued...

Enemy AI seems better than average, they hide, return fire, cover each other, suppress and attempt to flank. They will also shift position to address new threats which is nice. It is better than many games I have seen. I'm not sure I know enough about 1940's era rifleman tactics to be an accurate judge though.

Combat.
This is a sticky one. Aiming for the hip is generally useless at anything outside of 5-10 feet range with anything other than a pistol. Firing and aiming is pretty realistic. The weapons have drift on them, the sights are accurate, etc. However, where your sights are lined up on not always where your rounds go. Even if front and back are lined up you are pretty likely to miss with at least 30 of your shots.

Enemies generally take two shots to the torso to drop. They do fall down when hit and can be finished off while in their shocked state. But watch your recoil. It's nasty. Chaining shots is a slow process.

The odd exception to this is the sniper rifle which has almost no scope drift and kills everything in one shot.

A training course/firing range to help you get acclimated would've been nice...instead they just put some canned video on this piece and that's it. Like all tutorials, it is better to do things hands on so you can get used to them. The game does this is a natural fashion for the command system but not combat.

I learned to adjust a bit but there are some weird situations in this game. Hitting guys through fences that are made of a few strips of wood connected by posts is next to impossible. Guys who peak over berms can be difficult to hit as well, despite being zeroed on them.

Which leads us to the command system. Which seems to work a lot of the time and then completely craps out other times.

It's pretty much right mouse button to enter command mode, aim at a target or location, release mouse button and the squad will go there or suppress or attack, etc. Seems simple right? It pretty much is.

But I can't tell you how frustrating it was ordering suppression, releasing the button, starting to turn and then having the game shift my orders from suppress to move to right in front of the enemy position. Of course when this happens the entire squad gets wiped out. Joy.

Graphics.
This game has some decent environments and weapons, but the characters are pretty bad. Especially the faces, which really demolished the illusion here. Nothing to write home about in general.

With my rig, P3.8 with fg 5900 ultra + 2 gig of ram I ran the game at 1024x768 with most of the bells and whistles on. It ran around 40-50 fps except during some fo the big battles near the end of the game where it crapped out to an fps in the teens. That wss a one time deal though...

I beat the game on hard in about 7-10 hours? Pretty good length if you ask me. Generally I get bored with these 20 hour long games.

I give this one an 8/10 (Single Player)

I tired MP, and it really isn't my bag. I got this game more out of curiosity than passion and it was a lot more engaging than I hoped. It's definitely the best tactical game I've played and in some regards the most ambitious. I like a lot of what Gearbox tried to do with story and characters being added but the writing just isn't up to snuff IMO.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/18/05