Review: Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway (PS3/360)

Release: Sep 23 2008 (US), Sep 26 2008 (UK)
Developer: Gearbox
Publisher: Ubisoft
Genre: First-person Shooter

The story of Hell’s Highway immediately draws you in. While the majority of World War 2 shooters recreate the same scenes – if we have to storm the beach at Normandy one more time the TV will find itself flying out the window – Hell’s Highway has you following Sergeant Mathew Baker and his squadron through Operation: Market Garden, a historically accurate campaign designed to end the war by capturing a highway that runs through Holland, and into the heart of Germany. Of all the WW2 shooters we’ve played, Hell’s Highway makes you understand just how bad the soldiers really had it.

This feeling of intimacy and immersion is perhaps the game’s biggest strength; it’s a refreshing change as the majority of videogames have such poorly portrayed characters that you can never see them as in any way real. Each character feels like a real, living, breathing person creating a significantly richer experience as a result.

Take cover!

The gameplay is where Hell’s Highway shines. Most WW2 games allow you to plough through the Nazi’s ‘Hulk-style’ killing every solider before Hitler can take a breath, something not possible on this highway. Combat in Hell’s Highway takes a Gears of War style cover, suppress, flank, kill approach in which you’ll need to intelligently command your squad to succeed.  Encounters generally go a little something like this: see Nazi, order your guys to lay down suppressing fire, flank Nazi while pinned down, end Nazi’s life.  The system works surprisingly well and is a blast to play.

For the most part the friendly A.I is solid, but sometimes suffers from a few path-finding issues; getting stuck on bridges for instance, or moving to the wrong side of cover (leading to a quick and messy death). Enemy A.I. is also a little hit-and-miss.  Enemies will poke their head up from behind cover while you’re shooting them to see if you’re still around.

Hell’s Highway’s health system has been tackled in a rather strange way. Rather than losing health whenever you get hit, the screen turns red whenever you’re close to the Nazis and not in cover, even if your not getting shot at. If the screen goes completely red you die, even if you’ve not been hit… weird. While most of the gameplay is squad-based, your character ‘Baker’ often decides it’s a great idea to go into buildings whose entrances have the unfortunate tendency to close up as he enters, forcing you to go it alone.  These sections are in no way as immersive as their squad-based counter-parts.

On occasion you’re ripped from your squad and dropped into the role of a tank commander.  These sequences involve any destroying any unfortunate soul that has the horrible luck to be caught out on foot. While these sequences do a good job of adding a little variety to the gameplay, they’re not particularly exciting to say the least.

Boom Boom Bang Bang

The soundtrack is truly great, and brings the Saving Private Ryan memories flooding back, especially in the cut-scenes.  While Baker is giving a speech, or during one of the game’s other equally key moments, the music accompanies the action perfectly.  This success is echoed during gameplay as the music changes in a dynamic, natural way as you progress; helping you to feel and relate to the action that little bit more.

Sound effects, such as gunshots and explosions, sound amazing and every now and then you’ll flinch when a bullet gets little too close for comfort.  When a round from an .88 destroys the cover right in front of your face the sound alone makes you want to crawl under your bed and hide. If nothing else the audio alone is enough to make you fall in love with the game.

Graphically it’s all a little hit and miss.  You can easily get lost admiring the attention to detail that has gone into buildings and the soldier’s uniforms, and the slow-motion zoom that accompanies a head shot allows you to see the carnage in all its visceral glory. The game makes full use of its ‘M’ rating by unleashing torrents of blood from the slightest graze.

The misses are primarily reserved for the organic objects.  Grass is particularly ugly and the fire effects look more Xbox than Xbox 360. Character models are plagued by a horrible sheen effect that makes them seem like they’ve just come from the wax museum.  For the most part you’re so immersed in the storytelling that you don’t notice it, but about halfway through the game these graphical deficiencies become glaringly obvious.

WW2 with a headset

Hell’s Highway’s multiplayer consists of one mode, ‘Capture’; possibly the most generic game-type ever created. Capture is similar to capture the flag but with a few key differences. Each map holds two capture points that are located on opposite sides of the map, one team defends the points while the other attacks. Rather than capturing a flag and returning it to your base, one attacker starts with the flag and must raise it at either of the capture points while his teammates protect him from the defenders onslaught.

Each side is broken up into three, three man squads each consisting of a specialist (who can select a rocket launcher, sniper rifle or heavy machine gun), and two rifleman armed with a semi automatic rifle and two automatic weapons. Additionally, the attacking team gets command of a tank that can only be destroyed by using the rocket launcher, or sticking a satchel charge directly onto it. A few more maps would have been nice but the multiplayer is still a decent, and often addictive, experience.

In the end, Brother’s in Arms: Hell’s Highway’s annoying technical issues stop this tour of duty from truly impressing.  As it stands now this is a great shooter with an engaging single player campaign, and a fun multiplayer component that is let down by a few niggling problems.  It wont cause your copies of COD4 or Halo 3 to gather dust completely, but it’s a great distraction.

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Adrian "Shadow580" Marchisio has been playing games since the days of the super Nintendo and the Sega genesis. He's our resident Halo series expert and can pretty much answer any question's asked about the Halo story, he also owns an impressive set of consoles which includes Sega's Gamegear, all Gameboys, a PS1, a Virtualboy all of the last gen console's (PS2, PSP, Gamecube and original Xbox) as well as writing The Shadowed Halo. He is currently a hardcore gamer on Xbox Live and lives under the motto "Shoot First, Shoot Later, Shoot Some More And Then Possibly Ask Questions After Everyone Is Dead.". Feel free to contact him via E-mail at Shadow580@gamesareevil.com