"The most authentic WWII shooter - ever!" How many times have we heard this now? It seems every war-themed game on the block wants to be the most realistic and faithful, each toting scads of credentials and testimonials to prove its point. Clearly, they can't all be the most authentic, but I think the confusion comes from the fact that they all have a different idea about exactly what 'authenticity' is. Obviously we're not talking actual, 100 per cent verisimilitude here, or everyone involved would be vomiting bile and scratching their eyes out in horror. Uniforms, events and environments: yes. Pain, mutilation and seeing your buddies' brains explode in your face: not so much. So really, what we're talking about is the faithful reproduction of some elements of a conflict, and the thing that separates games is which bits they decide are important and which can be glossed over.
IT'S THE REAL THING Take Call Of Duty. Here you have an extremely 'authentic' WWII shooter, which recreates better than any other game the intensity of war, the sturm und drang of full-scale, combined arms conflict. On the other hand, you can drive a tank and fire its cannon at the same time, which is about as authentic as a fast food chicken teriyaki burger.
Brothers In Arms, while similar at a glance, has very different ideas about authenticity. It can't match Call Of Duty for sheer spectacle - it doesn't even try - but it refuses to gloss over things that most other games ignore. Things like the real tactics of combat - the way the war was actually fought rather than the way it's depicted in films. The sense of brotherhood of soldiers fighting side by side. And the fact that you need at least three people to man a tank. These things are the lifeblood of Brothers In Arms, and if any of them are even vaguely important to you, you're going to love it.
For the most part however, Brothers In Arms plays very much like any other WWII shooter. You run around shooting Germans, ducking behind hedgerows, clearing villages, blowing up tanks and generally having a jolly good time of it. The setting too is familiar. The game kicks off on D-Day, as you and your homies in the 101st Airborne prepare to land in German-occupied Normandy. Being paratroopers, you do of course arrive by 'chute, which fortunately negates any possibility of another Omaha Beach run. The rest of the game covers the crucial week following D-Day, as the Invasion forces desperately try to maintain their foothold on the French mainland and hold off the rallying Nazi horde.
Your squad is tasked with a series of vital support roles such as clearing fields for Allied glider landings, destroying tactically significant bridges and clearing villages of anti-tank gubbins. Which, according to historical records, is exactly what the 101st Airborne, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment did do.
Here then is Exhibit A in Brothers In Arms' comprehensive claim to authenticity. Not only are all the missions based on historical data, but the environments, weapons, weather and even the moon cycles are reproduced with exacting precision. None of this has much bearing on gameplay, but it's tremendous news for spotters and war buffs. Of more interest to the common man is the default setting without a reticule, forcing you to aim down the sights if you want any degree of accuracy, and the fact that there are no health packs (health is restored at the start of each mission) or quick-saves (checkpoints only, bub).
KEEPIN' IT REAL However, while all this gives the game a nice gritty edge, the thing that really separates BIA from other WWII shooters is its focus on real combat tactics. Developer Gearbox was keen to avoid the 'one-man army' approach that afflicts so many other games, and so places you in command of a squad of US troops, dubbed 'Baker's Dozen' after your alter-ego Matt Baker. Actually, you're just a grunt at first, taking orders from your platoon leader, but soon enough you have three men under your control, then three men and a tank, then eventually two teams of three. And while lone wolf heroics will get you through the first few missions intact, you soon find that these human resources are the key to your survival.
Luckily, it's dead simple. When it comes to squad-level infantry manoeuvres, tactics have changed little in the last 2,000 years (so we're told), and they're almost insultingly basic. First, you find your enemy - preferably before he finds you. Next, you 'fix' your enemy by laying down suppressing fire and preventing his escape. Third, you flank your enemy by sending part of your force around the side to a more advantageous position, and then you finish him off by firing on his now hopelessly exposed hindquarters.
Heads Up Until recently, war shooters mostly concentrated on the first and fourth aspects of this formula, skipping the tricky middle bits in favour of a corridor approach to combat. Games such as Call Of Duty expanded this vision to take in some 'fixing', giving enemies an awareness of their own vulnerability and thus enabling them to be suppressed.
Brothers In Arms completes the picture, and it does so with a device called Situational Awareness. It works a bit like this. As soon as you spot an enemy you press a key, pausing the action and sending the camera swooping to a third-person vantage above the battlefield. This view, while not strictly realistic, represents all the information available to you as squad leader. It's like a 3D map, showing the locations of all your troops, any tactical objectives, and most importantly, the location of enemy units visible to you or your men. From here, you can jump around to focus on points of interest and zoom, tilt or pan for a better view.
Action First Now, if you're an FPS diehard, I can see you might be fidgeting nervously, so I'll set your mind at rest. You don't use the third-person view to give orders. This is not an RTS - there are no waypoints, no clicking and dragging, no command rose. You're basically just having a look around in this mode, scouting for channels and pathways to use in flanking manoeuvres. Got it? The actual squad commands are given in the heat of battle and they number four in total. Yes, just four. To activate squad commands, you simply press the right mouse button, which brings up an arrow indicator. Drop the arrow on the terrain to make your boys go there, drop it over an enemy to make them shoot on that location, and hold right mouse and press left to make them assault a position. Your squads always act as a discrete unit, so there's no need for individual management; and if you want to just set them all to 'follow', you can do that too. Take it from me, a devout opponent of clunky tactical games like Rainbow Six: it could not be any easier.
Despite its simplicity however, the system is remarkably powerful. Your squad is blessed with extremely robust AI, enabling them to look after themselves in most situations and always seek the best cover no matter where you stick them. If they can't see their designated target, they shuffle around until they can - and if you ask the impossible they tell you where to go. Admittedly, they're not 100 per cent trustworthy, and you often find yourself doing the most dangerous tasks, but hey - that's what being in charge is all about. (Don't be stupid... - Ed)
HARD AS NAILS With this level of AI in place you can perform some pretty tidy manoeuvres. The most basic is to set a fire-team up somewhere where they can lay down cover-fire, then head off on your own to do the flanking. Fortunately, you always know when the enemy is cowering like a frightened kitten, as they all have a suppression indicator above their heads (though you can disable this if you're really hard).
Once you get a second team under your command - be it a tank or an assault team bristling with grenades and SMGs - the tactics really start to get interesting. Pincer movements, suppress-and-snipe, mad rushes - all these and more become valid ploys, and the satisfaction of success that much greater.
TICTACS All things considered, it's an excellent system. Poring over the tactical overhead view, the game often feels more like Combat Mission than Call Of Duty, but the balance is always up to you. As the game progresses, you quickly learn which tactic is going to work best in what situation and begin to dish out orders with more speed and confidence. By the game's halfway point, you really feel like you belong in charge of these sorry fellows.
Unfortunately, the game doesn't entirely share this confidence. In fact, it seems almost to flinch from giving you too much responsibility, keeping the tactical palette tantalisingly basic throughout. With a limit of two squads or tanks under your command, things eventually become repetitive, and it's exasperating that you're not trusted enough to go further. Similarly, BIA takes far too long to ease you into the action at the outset, and doesn't really give you full rein until the sixth or seventh mission.
OVER HERE! Ultimately, Brothers In Arms fails to take full advantage of its own, excellently conceived formula. As a player who prefers shooters, I find it a bit bizarre to be sitting here and demanding more tactical sophistication, but with a system this intuitive I just can't help myself.
Of course, there's still plenty of joy to be found here, and much of it is down to the excellent level design. The layouts are overtly simple at first, with undefended pathways that scream 'flank here, idiot!', but they soon warm up nicely, and some of the later, bullet-riddled levels require a good deal of forward planning.
One convenient advantage is that the terrain is ready-built for small-scale tactical challenges. Aside from the bits flattened by bombs, Normandy is defined by what's called bocage: a lightly wooded landscape of fields and narrow roads, criss-crossed with thick hedgerows that can't be breached by infantry - ideal for channelling movement and building tactical mazes. Elsewhere, you have towns riddled with alleys, barns and graveyards - all of which make for a terrain rich in tactical possibilities.
Unfortunately, while you're given freedom to explore these possibilities, the Hun most definitely is not. In contrast to the excellent friendly AI, the enemy AI is highly scripted and predictable. Enemies rarely have the freedom to move around a level as the battle dictates, either staying put or moving within very narrow boundaries. As such, they're never able to out-flank you, no matter how many times you show them how, and this makes it a very one-sided affair, tactically speaking.
BROTHERS ONLINE Fortunately, Gearbox has at least a partial answer to this, as Brothers In Arms comes with a bold and beautiful multiplayer mode that incorporates many of the tactics of the single-player game. To whit, each player arrives with a squad of three AI units in tow, and games consist of either one-on-one or two-on-two matches. When you die you switch to the next member of your squad, after which you respawn a whole new squad back at base. Cleverly, you can still use Situational Awareness (though of course it doesn't pause the action), which means you can locate enemies visible to your squad, as well as to your team-mate and his squad (in 2v2 games at least).
Each map offers a very different style of play, with a range of different objectives and parameters. In one instance, the Germans have to get a package to the other side of a village within an allotted time while the Americans prey on them with sniper rifles. In another, the Americans have to locate and evacuate a document case in a town choked by obscuring fog.
LOOKS FAMILIAR In many ways BIA's multiplayer game is similar to Enemy Territory - objectives are much the same, even identical in some cases. The big difference is the inclusion of AI squad-mates, which casts a very different complexion on proceedings and makes for some uniquely enjoyable tactics. Controlling the map and maintaining superior visibility often takes precedence over blind aggression, while laying a successful ambush with your troops is particularly gratifying.
Sadly, the ten multiplayer maps are somewhat small and unexciting compared to the likes of ET. There are two or three superbly crafted examples, but some pretty mediocre efforts as well, and this is sure to hurt the game's reception online. Hopefully the innovative nature of the mode will be enough to carry it, as it definitely deserves a look-in. As always, we'll be doing a full multiplayer review in Online Zone when the servers go live.
NICE PACKAGE Needless to say, the multiplayer is just a small part of the total Brothers In Arms package, and it's a package we think is highly deserving of praise. Gearbox's tactical shooter is not just great fun, it's a technically excellent and innovative piece of work that takes some bold design risks and slam-dunks pretty much every one. It may not have the flashy production values or grand scale of a Call Of Duty, but it establishes a tactical-action formula that trounces the opposition for functionality and ease of use, and the results are never short of compelling. As a first effort, Road To Hill 30 is pretty damn good - if Gearbox can just build on this, the next BIA will almost certainly be a classic.
PC Zone Staff
// Overview
Verdict
A triumphant combination of brains and brawn
Uppers
Excellent, intuitive tactical system Highly replayable Gritty realism Unique multiplayer game
Downers
Tactical side could have been developed further Enemy AI a bit wooden Not much brotherhood
One thing Gearbox was adamant about when making Road To Hill 30 was that the tanks would be exceedingly dangerous. None of this one grenade and they blow nonsense - these tanks are the real deal. I actually got a little annoyed at the game a couple of times because the tanks kept killing me, despite the fact that I was hiding. Hiding, you understand. Protected. Behind some, er, wooden crates. OK... So maybe I wasn't as sheltered as I could have been, but those cartons would have protected me in any other WWII game. Not so Brother In Arms.
In this game, the only way to stop a tank is with another tank, or a lot of hits from an anti-tank weapon. Either that, or an extreme act of stupidity that involves sneaking round the back of the vehicle, popping open the hatch and dropping in a live grenade. Actually, this technique is quite easy once you've got the knack for it, which slightly detracts from the fear factor, but is also extremely cool. So I guess it's a fair trade.
When you first get your hands on a tank, it’s quite wonderful.
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court, 30 Monmouth Street, Bath, UK BA1 2BW England and Wales company registration number 2008885
Excellent, intuitive tactical system
