Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway Review

This is going to be a weird one. I never played any of the previous Brothers in Arms games and the two reasons why I played this was because it was a game I had on PS3 for the longest time and I recently got into more slower paced "tactical" style of shooters.

I do think Hell's Highway is a solid game, and it does a do a solid job at standing out from other WW2 games like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty. However compared to more "modern day" tactical shooters like Rainbow 6 Vegas and the SOCOM games, I do feel like Hell's Highway does come up pretty short.

I'll start by talking about the story first and this is where playing Hell's Highway first might've been a mistake. The game pretty much expects you from the offset to know what happened in the first two BiA games and the recap that shows up at the start does a poor job at filling me in on what happpened previously.

The best way of describing Hell's Highway is that what if you were watching the latest season of an ongoing TV show and you didn't watch the previous seasons? That's what it basically is. There's lots of refrences to past events I had no idea what the game was even alluding to, the awkward facial animations didn't do the greatest of job of selling me on the material either. I was zoning out during many of the cutscenes because I just had no idea what the characters were even reffering to half the time and what the story was building up towards.

Maybe I should've played Road to Hill 30 and Earned in Blood but the fact that Hell's Highway also ended on a cliffhanger to this day that never got resolved isn't encouraging me to want to do so.

The gameplay however is solid but at the same time can be pretty one note. I do like how the game does a solid job at standing out from other cover based shooters at the time with the supression system, unlike other tactical shootes I played where it's about dealing with the enemies at long range and it's best to avoid close quarters combat, BiA is a game where the player places his squad at various points on the map and have them be a distraction while the player sneaks around or tries to distract enemies' long enough to get a headshot.

Speaking of headshots, I love the slo mo cam of the occasional headshots I get, it never happens often enough to get irritating and it happens enough times to the point where it can still be surprising.

The level design is solid and does a decent job at striking a line between Medal of Honor's level exploration and Call of Duty's overly scripted nature. There is a map and objectives but the levels are linear and the objectives you will do in a certain order but unlike say CoD, the gameplay never feels like the game is moving when you do so there is still a sense of level progression and not a linear set of explosions and cutscenes. Hell's Highway is still scripted to varying degrees but the scripted moments are primarily cutscenes. There are some scripted gameplay sections like one sniping section where you are escourting a kid to safety and the tank levels which are awful but other than that, the game is priamarily spent in slow paced tactical cover shooting.

There is also a nice standout mission where you are in an abandoned and creepy hospitle, the level loses it's impact since you were here earlier in the prologue but at the same time, the sections before the prologue parts do a good job at being creepy since ambience and lighting creates a rather unsettling atmosphere.

Here are some negatives, the first being the aforementioned tank sections which are awful and do a terrible job at making the player feel empowered. First, there are two health bars, one for the character and the armor, the former is where enemies can kill you with gunfire with ease and the second is where the tank shells and missiles will chip away at health and then slowly get you killed. A lot of these sections are trial and error at best.

An issue that I also had and this might be exclusive to the PS3 version that the framerate is awful. Borderline unplayable at times, and if the game didn't checkpoint as well as it did, these parts where the framerate was below 30 fps would've made me quit the game, but I was patient and stuck through it because of the checkpointing.

The objectives are also not as varied as something like Rainbow 6 Vegas and SOCOM games are so many of them in the former consist of "clear x area", "clear x amount of flak 88s", "kill x amount of tanks". It can get rather monotonous at times and while the slow paced and low health is tense, so much of the game consists of the player doing the same objectives, the short length of the game however prevents the game from being a super big slog.

Overall, Brothers in Arms Hell's Highway is a solid WW2 game and tactical shooter, just be sure to play the previous games and play on PC before jumping into this one. It definately has it's own unique identity and it's a shame the series is pretty much dormant now.