Sticking to the Jerry since 1941
And epic it is. Pay no heed to the fact that this is a re-tred of past glories - like any great Hollywood blockbuster you'll be too entertained with the action unfolding on the screen to care. Once more you'll be amazed at what the developers are squeezing out of the DS hardware as Brothers in Arms dolls out Spielberg spectacle with relish at every corner.
Be it Panzers bursting through the walls of the ruined church you're holed up in, the burning wrecks of Spitfires singeing your hair as they crash into the ground around you, or blowing clock towers brimming with Nazi snipers, the game's chock-full of 'wow' moments.
And those standout moments are just from the initial batch of missions from the first of three campaigns. In Normandy you parachute behind enemy lines and have to fight your way to regrouping with your division, while in North Africa you take part in a larger operation on the frontlines. By the time you finish in Ardennes you've ploughed through 16 missions.
But like that big-budget blockbuster, it's over all too quickly. While the different missions hit with all the explosive punch of a grenade, you'll fly through them. The majority of the Normandy missions can each be clocked in around ten minutes - and that's on your first run through. There are unlockable veteran and elite difficulty settings, but playing them underscores problems with both the control scheme and the poorly-flagged objectives..
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The control setup works very well, for the most part. The D-Pad moves your character, while the majority of the Touch Screen is used for the camera. The left shoulder button fires your chosen weapon, which can be selected (along with context sensitive actions and a camera zoom) from a top menu on the Touch Screen. When doing so we noticed that the camera control froze for a few vital seconds - dicey considering we had to constantly flip between sniper rifle, bazooka and SMG. It was an unwelcome misfire, for sure.
We'd have liked to see the ability to alter the Touch Screen sensitivity; as it stands we had to flick the stylus across the screen several times if we wanted to turn 180 degrees - a real problem when we were constantly being ambushed by attacks from all sides. This compounded another problem - the screen occasionally becomes too chaotic during larger battles, leading you to search blindly for a vital objective point. In some instances a tight time limit meant we needed to replay the same ten second scenario multiple times before we worked out where we needed to go and who needed killing - which can become incredibly frustrating.
But once you work out the layout of each mission, you can fly through the game, leading us to question whether you'll still be playing it six months from now. Like the summer blockbuster, it's worth playing once to experience the awesome spectacle - but whether there's enough there to warrant your hard-earned £30 is another question.