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

Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway takes place over nine days in Holland during operation Market Garden – an offensive designed to take the fight over the Rhine to Germany, and widely regarded as one of the most disastrous operations of the Allied campaign. You’re back in the boots of Sgt Matt Baker, who fans will remember playing in the first game of the series, and your former comrade Sgt Joe ‘Red’ Hartsock is back fighting alongside you. Baker’s squad are to drop behind enemy lines, secure the town of Einhoven and its surroundings, and then clear the outgoing road to Arnhem. It’s a high pressure situation, and not made any easier by the personal demons Baker is carrying with him..

Hells Highway isn’t your typical WW2 FPS - running and gunning won’t get you very far. The soldiers of the time had to rely on their squadmates and ad-hoc tactics to survive, so you’ll have to make good use of the teams placed under your command to get everyone across the battlefield safely. The game uses a system referred to as the four F’s – find, fix, flank and finish. As well as controlling Baker directly, you have the ability to issue position and fire orders to up to three teams fighting with you by using a simple, context sensitive command reticle – point it at the ground and you’ll give a move order, aim at an enemy or a destructible object and you’ll get the chance to either attack or suppress at that point.

In order to make this mechanic work, the game takes a few justifiable liberties with realism. If you hit the cover button whilst near a large object, you’ll duck in behind it and at that point you can’t be shot from anyone on the opposite side of that object unless you stick your head out to aim a shot. The enemy can also take advantage of this system, so battles can become stalemates unless you start to think tactically. To assist you in your plans, each enemy unit has a small red circle floating above it as an indicator of its readiness to fire. If you throw enough bullets in that direction the circle will slowly fill with grey slices until it’s complete, at which point the enemy is said to be suppressed. The grey line will tick back around until the circle is filled with red again, at which point the enemy will retaliate. It’s possible to keep most enemies suppressed indefinitely or hand off suppression duties to another team, which is a key part of building your strategies.

A typical scenario might go as follows: Baker has a machine gun team and an assault team with him, and they’re pinned down behind a wall with a barricaded machine gun nest fifty metres ahead. At some point that gunner will have to reload, so Baker can use this chance to order his machine gun team to lay down suppressing fire over the nest. This will understandably keep the enemy gunner’s head down for a bit, giving Baker a chance to order the assault team to advance along the edge of the battlefield using obstacles for cover until they’re in a position to attack the gunner from the side. This team is equipped with grenades, and an attack order will display the assault icon rather than the suppression one and cause them to throw a grenade into the nest from cover while the gunner is still suppressed. With that threat out of the way Baker and the machine gun team can move up the battlefield while the assault team keep watch.

It’s a very elegant and easy to master system that brings an almost puzzle-like feel to the game – you’re under constant pressure, but you can still control the flow of battle and buy time to think. There are a few issues caused by such a consistent rule based approach, with the main one being that enemies seem to have little awareness of the rest of their unit. You can shoot one soldier and watch his two squad mates continue to stand there firing as if nothing had happened. This ensures that the cover system applies fairly to all, but is a little unrealistic. The same applies to explosive damage where the blast radius of a grenade appears to be surprisingly well defined and won’t touch anyone just outside it. You’ll also have the odd moment where you order a team to a position of cover and they choose to cross into a firing zone to get there rather than seeking a quicker way around, so you need to make sure of your suppression before issuing any instructions. These things niggle, but they’re definitely not deal breakers – you just accept them as part of the mechanic and find ways around them where necessary.

That’s the action part of the game in a nutshell, but there’s far more to the overall experience than that. Each level is wrapped in very long and detailed cutscenes that reveal the emotions experienced by the men in such a desperate situation. There are a number of story threads that surface from time to time, ranging from the history of Baker’s apparently cursed silver pistol, to the secret of why a squad mate from a previous game stood up in front of a panzer tank and challenged it to kill him... with understandable consequences. These sequences are nothing short of superb, with exceptional voice acting and scripting – they may seem melodramatic, but in context they work perfectly. Baker’s tortured soul manifests itself through hallucinations of dead squad mates, brutal flashbacks to previous situations, and an altered sense of reality in some of the darker environments. The developers don’t pull any punches and it’s made clear from the start that no character is indispensable. It’s definitely not a feelgood story or one where history will allow you to expect a happy ending, but it is gripping, at times heartbreaking and utterly engrossing.

The atmosphere generated by the graphics and sound go a long way towards bridging the gap between the story and the action. While the Unreal 3 powered visuals can be absolutely breathtaking at times, there are situations where the engine seems to struggle briefly or the textures aren’t as clear or varied as you’d like. This is common to many U3 based games though, but it does highlight a slight lack of polish in a small number of situations. The sound is another matter entirely – we’ve already praised the voice acting, but the noises of the battlefield are the icing on an already impressive cake. The sounds of 88mm artillery shells exploding around you while bullets zing past your ears are all captured perfectly and add to the chaos of the environment. This is definitely a game to play loud.

Hells Highway takes a great approach to historical shooters that’ll appeal to anyone wanting a slightly more cerebral edge to their FPS action. It does have its faults but the positive qualities are more than enough to overcome them and the storyline and atmosphere make for an entertaining, if moody experience.

 8/10