BIA: HH My Review
Remember when you first looked up games coming to your console. Every new console has those games that are “coming soon”. Sometimes these slip away from the expected release date, and sometimes they show up when you least expect it.
Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway is one of those games. Announced early on, and missing its orginal release date by about a year. I can still remember seeing the footage of a soldier walking while looking up in a window of house. A frenzied lady pointing to a German hiding behind a snow white sheet hanging on a clothing line. He waits to kill you, but the women's warning saves your life.
And of course this never happens in the game much to my disappointment. However a game that I had no desire to play a few months ago, became a game I could not resist playing over the last few days.
I had a lot of fun with this game. And that is the most important thing.
I have never finished a BIA game before. The first one angered me where I had to blow up poles in an open field so my gliders would not blow up and kill my reinforcements. So a lot of the story might have been lost to me.
Nevermind that the game jumps the shark in the first few moments. But you won't get that until much later in the game. You play Matt Baker. The character from the other games, who is having a few “issues”. Your task, open up a highway into Germany. Operation Market Garden. And be home in time for Christmas.
BIA is based on real events. And Operation Market Garden was a big FUBAR mission. The Germans were able to stop this from being successful. However, you never really feel like you are in a hopeless failure.
But lets get to the game play. This is a squad based game. You have teams with you almost all the time in the game. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses. And like any game of this kind, the game's AI has to be smart enough to do its assigned task.
Which in this case, is pretty good. Yes sometimes they will run into enemy fire to come the long way around to your position if you call to them. But with a little pre-planning you can usually avoid this by setting the marker one place, and then moving it before they arrive, going a safer route. They will put cover fire on the enemy while you flank enemies. And this is basically the premise of the game.
Like other BIA games, this one usually “real” city designs from WWII. The villages you come into are mapped after real war sites. Making it seem more open as it is too scale. In ways this makes the game more believable and fun. Also the game wants you to explore, giving you KILLROYS to find. (A little face that soldiers would paint on walls to say Hi. I was here first) and Recon spots that give you real information about the events of WWII itself.
The graphics are good, if maybe a little plane. There is screen tearing and occasional stutter. But nothing really bad. In fact the stutter happens more often in cinema scenes than actually gameplay.
The voice acting is really good. The characters are believable, even if the story seems very strange at times. However you do feel like the characters are real.
The campaign seems a decent length. Its challenging, but not frustrating. You may fail a really tough section a few times, until you really “get” what you need to do. But they dole out the check points at good spots, so you always seem to be making progress.
After a few years in development some of the controls may seem a little archaic. However it has a decent cover system, it has a run button and sending your troops out is fairly easy. The grenade throwing is a pain and rarely feels like it lands where it should. .
I have to say this is a very solid game. I did not get to try out the online, since live was down, so you may want to check around before you purchase this game for that feature alone.
I give this game a B +
Feeling Robbed Moment: Everytime a team member in a squad would die, I would restart at the last checkpoint, not wanting to loose them forever. However I learned later that at every check point they come back to life. That alone would have saved me some time.
