Interesting game, fun to play, with some quirks, aggravations, and slow spots. Good, but there's room for improvement.
Then along comes this game. I played this one immediately after finishing Call of Duty 1 & 2, so I had a fresh basis for comparison. Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is all about the shooting mechanics. The weapons in this game are unique from previous shooters in their unwieldiness – but that’s not necessarily an entirely bad thing, though the awkwardness of firing the various weaponry can be aggravating. You have to aim down the sight to hit anything, and the view wobbles to and fro the whole time, but I suppose it’s fairly realistic. I liked it, for the most part. You expend a lot of ammo trying to hit anything, but that’s what makes this game interesting: the difficult, unforgiving act of shooting. The physics models for the weaponry are what will make you keep coming back, because they reflect the difficulties and realities of marksmanship.
To a point. Your semi-automatic rifles have all the accuracy of a badly maintained musket in the hands of a drunken man shivering in sub-zero temperatures. And the recoil on the harder-hitting weapons like the M1 Garand makes it all the worse. You will bang away at a target 30 yards away, and if you’re lucky he will go “ouch” after firing five or ten rounds aimed into his center of mass. When you pick up an automatic weapon it’s quite a bit less frustrating – and that much more gratifying. Cleaning out a nest with even a lowly Thompson or MP40 is a treat after hammering away with this game’s ineffectual version of the MI Carbine for five minutes. All fun, though.
Moving on to level and mission design. Compared to truly amazing games like Call of Duty, this game is a bit on the tame side. Oh, sure, the language and the gore are more down-and-dirty, but the action is very shooting-gallery, too much so for Brothers in Arms to be a truly hyper-paced first-person-shooter. In most firefights, basically, you and your enemies fire at one another from concealed positions. You can have your squad lay down suppressing fire while you attempt to flank the enemy machinegun nest or artillery emplacement or whatever. Much of the time, enemies are content to play a defensive role and stay put, rather than storming your position *en masse.* By contrast, in CoD 1 and 2, there are some levels where you feel a bit shell-shocked with the wave after wave of enemies and artillery barrages which are aimed at you – you personally. And CoD 1 and 2 had some really epic battles, conveying the mayhem and the din of assault and siege warfare admirably – it had shock and awe, no hyperbole intended. This offering, again, is a bit more slow-paced and measured, and much of the challenge (and the fun) lies in mastering the tricky shooting mechanics of your rifles and submachine guns.
While the physics and associated details for the weapons and the characters are great (bodies get thrown realistically; machineguns stutter and buck and flash impressively), the world could be more dynamic. By 2005, is it too much to ask that a small brick wall or sandbag bunker should get blasted apart by multiple tank shells? Or couldn't a wooden cart get blown apart? Unfortunately these everyday structures and objects appear to be made of material so advanced, explosive shells won't put a dent in them. And, for a game that stresses – even insists on – flanking maneuvers, it would be nice to be able to climb over a three-foot high wall or wooden fence. Instead, your choice of paths is very restricted and linear; it sometimes feels like you're being driven in a chute.
Squad control is not that great of a thrill. It's too much like work, and your squadmates enjoy moving in an inefficient, idiotic fashion, sometimes taking the most exposed route to assault a position, even when there's a safer more direct path right in front of them. Tanks, too, can have a difficult time finding the best path unless you connect the dots for them. Your squad is good for laying down covering fire, but don't let them wander out into the open or it's curtains. They like to die on you, at least that was the case at the more difficult level I was playing on. I would have rather had a pre-mission selection screen where you pick a few squadmates and outfit them, and from there they would act on their own AI-based initiative and require little or no babysitting. Maybe even allow you to shift control to whatever character you like, like in the Deadly Dozen series. If they had combined that feature with this game, it would have been a total blast.
Now, not to sound trite, but what I dislike most about this game is the lack of a save game feature. It’s nothing new in WWII shooters, I know, but in this game it really becomes an impediment. Look, I started off on the next-to-highest difficulty level (the one just beneath “authentic”) because I only plan on playing through most games once. I would rather reload a few times at a harder level and be challenged, than run through without working up a sweat and be bored. But, despite what I read in several reviews, the checkpoint-save system is NOT frequent enough, particularly as the mission objectives and subsequent checkpoint locations are often dubious and ill-defined. Too many times I hacked away at an objective for ten minutes (while the game *still* didn’t save), only to be caught in a crossfire or be forced to traverse ground near an MG42 and get mowed down unceremoniously. Then – joy! – I got to play the same ten minutes over and over three or four times. That plain sucks. In Road to Hill 30, as far as I know there’s not even a cheat to work around it, as there was in Far Cry and Operation Flashpoint. You’re stuck with the checkpoint save they give you, and that’s that. And it detracts from the experience considerably, and causes you to go over a lot of ground over and over again. Unless you set the difficulty to Mickey Mouse level. When will you developers learn? You cannot go wrong by putting a user-friendly save game option in the game. And, more often than not, you developers will go very, very wrong – often pissing off many gamers – when you leave the save game out. One of my peeves with CoD2 was the removal of the perfectly good “save” feature they had in the first game. That was stupid, changing to a checkpoint system for the sequel; it’s a downgrade, plain and simple. But at least the checkpoints were generally close enough together, even on the tough difficulty levels. But still, a good rule of thumb is to put the bloody save game in. If it’s good enough for games like Half-Life and Serious Sam, it sure as heck is good enough for the likes of Brothers in Arms or Medal of Honor. At least make a save game cheat available. Sheesh.
Graphics are good but not great. There are a lot of realistic landscape features that make the terrain interesting and help you become immersed. The character models are well done; that one smirking sergeant is rather amusing with the sidelong looks he gives you. Textures and sky could sometimes be better. The game runs smooth on my older mid-grade system (P4 2.6 GHz, Geforce 6800, 1024 MB RAM), with most of the settings cranked up.
The overall atmosphere, too, is good but not great. Compared to the noisy, bombed-out, troop-infested locations in CoD, many of the settings here are bit too pastoral and intact. And the sound effects can be flat and restrained. Gunfire is too muted and gentle, and the general timbre of warfare is less than awesome. The voice acting is acceptable, but I got really tired of the womanish shrieks of my squad members (“Can’t hit em from here! Are you kidding me? Baker, get down! We’re screwed!” and so forth).
Now, I spent a lot of time talking about the downsides of this game. There are some real gripes and irritations, but don't get me wrong: Road to Hill 30 is far from terrible; indeed it is very compelling. For the most part it is an interesting game, definitely worth a go. And, like I said above, the crazy-hard weapons models alone, being difficult to master and satisfying to play around with, make this game worthwhile and give it a decent amount of playability. Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 brings some new concepts into play that serve to move the fps genre forward, and that ain’t bad.