Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30

"Great game, innotative ideas"

Hey guess what? It's time to kill Germans yet again! Fear not, this game actually is a standout in this incredibly crowded genre.

Game play: 10/10
Game play is easily the best. There are the general things like gun variety, tension and intelligent AI, but also, it comes with the incredible squad command and supression/assult system. You can now command squads and sometimes tanks to assault or suppress enemies in the game. In fact, if you let off a clip of MG42 or M1 ammo, the enemy indicator will turn gray and the enemy will be much more cautious and suppressed for a period of time. Once you play this way, you can't go back to the simpleton scripted AI and command ever.

Graphics: 7/10
Fro some odd reason, the game heavily favors NVIDIA cards over ATI. So for roughly half the gaming population, expect to get about half the frames per second as a comparable NVIDIA card. You can obviously turn down settings like over bright and geometry, but it's inexcusable to leave so many out in the cold. Granted, the game looks pretty nice, but 20-30fps average on my 9800xt at 1024x768 no anti aliasing and trilinear filtering is horrible when Half Life 2, which looks better, runs at 50-60fps with 1152x864 2x anti aliasing, 16x anisotropic, maxed settings. Quake 4 runs 40-50fps 1024x768 max everything also, so the incredibly poor performance is inexcusable.

Sound: 9/10
The sound is great. There is pretty good scripted sound pieces and gun noises are realistic. There is good 3d and 2d sound support as well as many options.

Playability: 9/10
Controls are of your standard shooter variety, WASD, mouse look, etc. All are remappable. Some default controls felt funky to me, but that's probably because I've spent hundreds of hours playing the half life games, expansions, multiplayer, etc.

Polish: 9/10
Good, except that the game hate's 1/2 of the world's hardware. Bug less and a thrilling game, could be longer though, a good afternoon can find you finishing this game.

Options: 6/10
There are a good number of options. Graphics, sound, controls are all adjustable.

AI: 10/10
Best freaking AI ever. With the indication that suppressive fire actually does something and the fact that you can control the squads, it's a great experience. You never forget about the first time you forget to suppress a German squad and when focusing all your efforts on the other squad, the squad you forgot about flanks and kills half of your fire team.

Conclusion: 9/10
Almost faultless game play wise and there truly is not better World War 2 shooter. You must try this if you have any interest in World War II, First person shooters or action strategy.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 01/05/06