Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway (Xbox 360)

The animations for Hell’s Highway are top notch, there’s a sense of realism about these soldiers that comes through in the game core and the cut-scenes. Combined with the sharp and often punchy dialogue between these characters, facial expressions and body animations bring them to life and make you give a damn about the guys that you’re fighting with. You actually might feel something for Baker’s crew if one of them goes down during the mission. Fortunately, most of the time, it seems they’re down but not out unless of course they’re no longer needed to drive the story forwards.

This segues nicely into the AI of the game, allied soldiers are pretty good. They’ll take cover and they’ll keep out of harms way to the best of their ability. They’ll use grenades if they’re close enough and follow your orders without getting into a sticky situation unless you make a bad tactical error and have them rush a PAK-88 head on. Enemy soldiers know what cover is, know how to use it and take pot shots at you in turn most of the time, you’ll have to adjust your tactics from the normal run and gun mentality to get the best out of the game, especially at the harder difficulty levels. They also know how to flank and will use the environment to their best advantage.

Fortunately there’s a destructible cover system in the game, so you can blow wooden objects they use as cover to smithereens. This of course means conversely, they can do the same to you.

The music design in the game is great, it’s stirring and it doesn’t drown out the action at all. The sound design is likewise excellent with some real attention to detail in the audio department. I also have to say that the voice acting is superb, there’s even a performance from Band of Brother’s: Sink, just to round out the spot-on casting of Baker and his crew.

It’s not all sunshine and smiles in the game though, because whilst the single player is solid, the multiplayer is pretty much run of the mill. Offering three maps with one game type, we’re straying into the territory set forth by Battlefield: Bad Company here, that shipped with only the one mode and became tiresome pretty quickly. In Hell’s Highway it has squad based play; there are four types of character you can play:

Leader: sets down markers for his team mates.

Regular: standard squaddie armed with basic weapons.

Special: armed with sniper rifles, bazookas or heavy machine guns.

Tank: Exactly what it says on the tin.

The three maps have ‘capture the flag’ style objectives and whilst being fairly decent maps, there’s no real longevity to the gameplay. You play offence or defence; you raise a flag at a point or try and stop the other team from doing so. You get one life and then it’s off to Observer/Spectator mode for you until the end of the round. The winner is the team left standing.

That’s it, nothing like Rainbow Six Vegas 2’s robust multiplayer or Call of Duty 4, just vanilla CTF with no staying power. A few more modes might have made good use of the three maps, even some kind of beach landing or retelling of certain scenarios for the mp portion of the game. Of course, it lacks co-op and that’s always something I like to see in a game. I tire of adversarial deathmatches.

There was no noticeable lag however and the mp ran smoothly enough, it was just like taking a bite out of a Big Mac and finding that what you thought was nutritional value, is really just a bunch of chemicals capable of keeping that burger fresh until the end of time. Sadly, there’s nothing here in Hell’s Highway’s multiplayer that will keep it fresh.

Hell’s Highway is a great game for the single player story and gameplay however and with an unlockable ‘realistic’ difficulty there’s some reason to finish the game. You can also hunt around for Killroys, which are the little pictures of the guy with the huge nose that US soldiers used to doodle everywhere in the war. If you’re looking for a squad based tactical game with a cinematic edge, set in World War Two then you should look no further than this one.