Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is not a
Medal of Honor or
Call of Duty clone. You won’t be storming beaches or taking back cities.
Brothers in Arms takes you to the rural countryside of Northern France and pits you against the Germans in a battle of infantry tactics. Instead of the grand scale levels of the aforementioned games, you face the enemy in fields and small towns, broken farms, and meandering streams. The fighting is up close and personal, but you won’t do it alone.
Where Brothers in Arms differs from other WWII games is in the non-playable characters. It’s almost not fair to compare it to older WWII games, as the gameplay here is a very different experience. Working with and giving orders to the men around you is crucial to everyone’s survival. As the sergeant of a group of a dozen airborne troopers, you must lead small squads to suppress, flank, and kill the enemy.
This is the core of the game. Mostly linear in nature, you go through more than a dozen missions trying to outsmart German infantry and tanks. You rarely are alone; usually you have two other squads with you, one outfitted for suppressing the enemy and the other geared up with grenades and small arms to assault them while they are being pinned by the first team.
Though this is the essence of Brothers in Arms, it unfortunately isn’t always given the chance to shine as much as it should. The middle part of the game is purely this kind of gameplay; you lead two squads against dug-in German soldiers. The beginning is slow to bring you into the real thick action, and the end degrades into run-and-gun action where the squad-based tactics are only a cautionary action that need not be taken. Had the game given you more than two squads, or provided you with bigger firefights, it would have really been magical. However, this isn’t to say that what’s there isn’t good. It just would have been better if there was more of it.
As you would imagine, the Artificial Intelligence is a crucial part of the gameplay. 95% of the time, the A.I. responds the way you intend it to. There are only a few issues with it, mostly when you are ordering tanks around and it does the unexpected like sit in the same spot when you continuously give an attack order. You’ll quickly realize if an order didn’t get through and the situation is easily remedied, but it is still a minor ache to deal with.
Where the A.I. is really lacking is in the enemies. The whole game you are maneuvering around them, but the only time they do any maneuvering is when they attempt a retreat. You’re never really faced with an opposing squad who is trying to outflank you, so you can idly sit back and take your time planning out how you will crush the two idiots who are stuck behind barrels, trees, fences, or whatever other static defense they never move out from. The only way you’re going to get that kind of action is through Xbox Live where you can play against another human who has their own squads to control.
