Mission 13: Purple Heart Lane

Objective: Advance to Bridge 4 on the Causeway

Well, you've got a sniper rifle, which is good, but you've got a bazillion Germans attempting to take you out, and you'll have to proceed past them on an open spit of land while you're getting sniped at all the while. Sounds like fun.

You've got three German teams in the flooded field behind the farmhouse at which you start, but you'll luckily have the powerful sniper rifle to use on them. Get your fire team set up behind one of the stone walls here, then wrap around the western side of the wall and head south while your assault and fire teams suppress the closest Germans. You should be able to pick off one or two of them with your sniper rifle; just kneel, wait for your aim to steady, then wait for one of them to pop his head up before taking him out. If you wrap around to the western side of their position, you'll be able to get eyes on the team to the southeast, so kill all of them before moving your assault team around to kill the remaining German from the nearest squad. After all that's done, you'll only have one team left to kill. They're going to be tough to suppress, so your best bet is to try and lure them out to the southeastern wall that they like to hide behind, then move one of your teams around to their rear and tell them to assault. If you set up well to the south, then you can also try to snipe them from a distance, but you may take damage if you stay in the open too long.

This is going to end well.

After you hit your checkpoint, you'll see two German squads coming up the causeway from the south. They're completely exposed to your fire, so get your teams behind the earthen walls or the fences here and unload on them until they go down before heading underneath the bridge to meet up with Cole.

The Mad Dash

Here's where the fun begins. Cole's going to instruct you to cross the causeway, which is unfortunately under fire from four to six infinitely respawning German troops across the way. You can suppress them, sure, but actually taking them out is another matter. Unfortunately you're going to have to advance while being shot at. Actually succeeding in getting across the entire causeway can be more luck than skill, especially on difficult or Authentic modes.

Video Walk-through

Getting across the causeway with your health intact is more important than moving up your teammates, in our opinion.

Watch It »

You have two basic options here: you can either attempt to do it the "real" way, and move your teams up the causeway by jumping from cover to cover in a leapfrogging pattern; or you can attempt to cover your own ass by having your teams lay down covering fire for you while you run to the end of the causeway. Both solutions are fairly dangerous, so be prepared to reload your game more than once.

To do it the authentic way, you'll need to get your teams up to the two firing positions near the checkpoint and have them start suppressing the enemy teams across the way, leaving the two German teams farther down the path unsuppressed. What you're going to want to do is attempt to suppress two of the teams, shift your fire team to another team further to the south, then move your assault team up to the next farther cover and use them to provide cover for the fire team while they move up, and so on. Before you attempt to move, though, be sure that you've sniped one member of each pair of Germans, so that each team's firepower is cut in half before you move. Just before you move a team, snipe out the other members of the two nearest German squads; they'll take a moment to respawn, giving you a bit of peace in which to move.

By this method, you can get to the end of the causeway, but your teams will probably take a good amount of damage no matter how careful you are. If you're willing to risk your own hide, though, you can make it to the end of the causeway pretty quickly. The basic technique is much the same; suppress the nearest two German teams, then snipe out one member of each of the two to the south. Instead of moving your teams, though, you're just going to run up the hill to the road and work your own way down the path, preferably after shifting your fire team's suppression to one of the southern German squads and killing the remaining soldier in the other. If this is all done quickly enough, you should be able to make it most of the way down the road without getting hit, although you will have to hope that a mortar shell doesn't land on you. They fall infrequently, though, so the chances of this are slim.

Well-Defended MG

When you reach the end of the causeway, you'll almost be at the bridge, but another task will await you; a German MG has been set up to the west, and you'll have to overrun it before you can get over the river. If your teammates make it all the way down here alive, they'll immediately take up the worst possible cover, so you'll probably want to bring them back up to the road and park them while you kill the German snipers that appear to the north. When they're down, you'll have to wrap around to the back of the MG nest and kill both the gunner there and another pair of soldiers. Since we were so close to a checkpoint at this point, we didn't bother with subtlety; we just ordered our remaining soldiers to assault the Germans while we flanked them from the north and took them out.

With that done, you can return to the bridge to finish the mission off.