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Monday 20 Oct 2008
Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway is a game about inconsistencies and consistency. It inconsistently shows the brilliant depth of ordering your squad around in first-person. It inconsistently looks amazing. It inconsistently makes you feel like a soldier in the middle of a war zone. It also consistently pulls you out of an illusion, making you feel like you’re playing a videogame. It consistently frustrates you by pulling you away from its core triumphs. It consistently reveals what developers Gearbox were attempting, but failed to do. Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway promises to be a fantastic game, but ultimately is only ‘merely’ great.
The promise starts with the cutscenes, easily the weakest part of the game. Clearly inspired by the effortless banter and chaos present in other World War 2 media, such as Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, the cutscenes in Hell’s Highway end up looking, sounding and feeling bloated and chaotic for all the wrong reasons. Conversations may begin at one point, but another plot-point takes over as the camera continues to pan past the current scene, moving onto the next set of characters speaking. This may happen three or four times per scene, disjointedly cutting from one story titbit to the next.
While dialogue is delivered convincingly, scenes set in the heat of battle feel empty, containing nothing to back up emotions present in the characters’ voices. A large fire fight may be taking place, with a few screams, gun shots and explosions in the background, but the scene will still seem like a silent, soul-less experience, probably due to the lack of music. While not realistic to play any sort of music during a scene of war, it sure would have helped add some emotion and atmosphere to individual, non-interactive skirmishes.
The proper story presented in various cutscenes jump around so much you never know if you’re watching something from the past, present or future, despite the visual reminder in the form of the obligatory date/time stamp. A tale of mystery and intrigue is trying to emerge from these moments and constant time-machine flitting, but the story is hardly intelligible with the back and forth technique - the mystery and intrigue turn rather to moments of obvious exposition, which may or may not incite a groan while watching the painfully edited scenes. If any of this confuses you, then you just got a taste of what it’s like to watch one of these little cinemas.
As mentioned, these sections of the Hell’s Highway are by far the game’s most feeble aspects - the rest of the game is much more able and certainly holds up to scrutiny, if only just. When Hell’s Highway isn’t breaking the illusion of filling the boots of a World War 2 squad leader, it’s providing an immersive first-person shooter experience that manages to draw you in, allowing you to fight battles in a completely different way to other action games. Hell’s Highway is, for all intents and purposes, a first-person puzzle game, as you guide and direct any soldiers under your command around the field of battle, choosing their cover points and targets with a system that, at first, may seem unwieldy, but is soon understood and mastered.
It’s up to you as the leader to position your groups of soldiers in ideal locations to keep the enemy under fire, while you or another squad flanks the target, catching them and killing them in the crossfire. Levels are laid out to enable you to take advantage of cover and flanking opportunities, outthinking your opponents instead of simply outgunning them. These skirmishes are satisfying when you get your moves right, setting your enemies up for a flanking manoeuvre and taking them down unawares. These skirmishes are not satisfying when your men don’t obey direct orders and decide to take their own path to a chosen cover position, getting cut up in the process.
The act of shooting in Hell’s Highway is also sufficiently satisfying, especially when aided by your squads. It all falls apart, however, when you’re sent on solo missions and there is no squad available for you to tackle enemies with. The game is at its strongest when you are accompanied by your team, giving you a lot of decisions in the space of a few seconds to clear any given area. When you’re on your own, these decisions go away and you’re left with a rudimentary shooter experience, plodding from one cover point to the next in the hopes that you don’t get shot. Another thing that becomes apparent when you’re left to do all the shooting is that the game can, at times, feel like an advanced game of Whack A Mole, with enemies on the other side of cover popping up and ducking down in time with their allies. By the time you’ve moved your sights over to an exposed enemy, he’s ducked down again, while another enemy has popped up, forcing you to readjust your aim, all the while getting ripped apart by their bullets.
So what exactly is so bad that it distracts you enough to destroy your World War 2 illusion? How about not being able to jump over or navigate items that are less than waist high? Not being able to open any door? Some objects being destructible while many are not? Shooting a chandelier only to see it remain stiffly attached to the ceiling? Your A.I. allies bunching up and even trapping you in a corner? The bad self-shading present in all cutscenes (and apparently a problem most Unreal Engine 3 games suffer from)? The inconsistent texture quality? All of these things, once encountered after a particularly intensive fire fight, absolutely make it impossible to suspend your disbelief and crop up every few minutes. Some of them are understandable, but others have been present in similar games since Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and the original Call of Duty. Texture and model pop-up is definitely also present, leading to the same unreality shattering results as the aforementioned issues. While these are the biggest gripes that could be taken up with Hell’s Highway (and they are small annoyances) they add up to big distractions.
While Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway is a very solid and, at times, fun and brain-teasing World War 2 shooter, Gearbox certainly should have either smoothened out those cutscenes or provided story exposition in a much more rudimentary fashion - a diary being read to players, for example - instead of spending an apparently large amount of time creating scenes that hang between ‘not worth it’ to ‘needs polish’. The inconsistencies experienced during the game, combined with some badly realised portions meant to break up the pace (the solo, protection and tank missions) and the simply-not-necessary multiplayer leave a bad taste in the mouth. Focussing on the strongest element of the game, however, (that being the very game of tactics and shooting you’ll be presented with 60% of the time) washes the bad flavour away and leaves you with a fun strategic shooter.
Your ultimate mission while playing Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway would be to ignore the story, enjoy the visuals when you can and find the best, most clinical way in which to decimate your enemies. That’s where you’ll find the fun.
Pros: Graphics, at times; Gameplay mechanics unique to the series;
Cons: Multiplayer; Effort wasted on cutscenes;
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| Contributor: |
Oliver |
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