1-Jul-2005 We really should have seen it coming. I mean, they did develop the most tactically astute WWII shooter on the market, so what did we expect? Randy Pitchford and his battle-worn regulars at Gearbox Software have just routed us. We thought we'd had the last word with our Brothers In Arms review, but they just launched a blistering counter-offensive, sneaking around and jabbing a bigger, better follow-up into our hopelessly exposed flanks.
Meanwhile, our attentions were focused elsewhere, scanning the horizon for the customary holiday expansion pack. But that would have been too predictable. Instead, Gearbox has struck back with a fully-fledged sequel called Earned In Blood, which not only promises a lavish array of new single and multiplayer missions, but directly counters each and every criticism we fired at the first game. Now we know how Jerry must have felt on that fateful day in June of '44...
THE BIG PUSH Of course, it's great news really. We thoroughly enjoyed the first Brothers In Arms, and actually said in our review that we'd love to see a follow-up that tidies up some of the shortcomings of the first game. We just didn't expect it so damn soon. As Gearbox chief Randy Pitchford explains: "We kinda lied because we didn't want to talk about Earned In Blood, but we've been working on it for a long time. In fact we've been working on it since before the first game shipped. We had to, because it's really a big game. It's a bigger game, it's a better game, and it's got some new features that have never been done before."
Exactly what those are we'll get to in due course, but for now let's stick to the broad picture. Earned In Blood picks up exactly where Road To Hill 30 left off. Having liberated Carentan and fought off the German counterattack, the 101st Airborne and the rest of the invasion force now have to push forward and pinch off the whole Cherbourg peninsula. This time, instead of Sgt Matt Baker (the unwilling hero of the first game), you take the role of Joe 'Red' Hartsock, formerly Baker's fire team leader but now a sergeant in his own right. "When it came to making the new game," says Pitchford, "we thought, what if we could be Hartsock? He's cool, he's gung-ho, he's got a lot of ambition, plus there's always been this tension between him and Baker. So let's become Hartsock, let's take this character to the next level and see this tension from a different perspective."
STREET FIGHTER Like the first game, Earned In Blood will be split into 20 chapters. The difference is, each chapter is about 50 per cent larger than before, with broader battlefields and many more combat encounters. The emphasis will be much more on urban warfare, leaving the classic Normandy hedgerows behind and taking the action to the streets.
"It's all about liberating the towns," says Pitchford. "It's street-to-street combat, house to house, town to town, with the bombed-out shells of buildings all around. It's a very different look and feel."
City fighting also comes with its own set of tactics. Gaining the high ground will be key, as will flushing enemies out of buildings with grenades and avoiding ambush in the narrow urban byways. It's a whole new game of dice.
By far the biggest transformation, however, is the nature of the enemy you'll be facing. Where the enemies of the first game were predictable, scripted and just begging to be outflanked, the opponents in Earned In Blood now have minds and manoeuvres of their own, and they know all your favourite moves.
"In Road To Hill 30," says Pitchford, "we took a lot of risks with squad combat, but we relied upon what we called situational AI for the enemies, where the designers had to set it all up. For Earned In Blood, we've got a dynamic system where the Germans react using their own logic. Now, the enemy actually manoeuvres on you, uses tactics against you, will hunt you down and kill you."
Anyone who's played the first game will realise the importance of this. As good as the 'find, fix and flank' system was, the encounters in Road To Hill 30 were very one-sided, with the hapless Germans falling for the same schoolboy tactics every time. Giving them the same options as you, and the awareness to put them into effect means we should see a much more fluid, unpredictable battlefield.
To demonstrate this, Pitchford loads up a typical-looking encounter from the new game, with two German squads facing Pitchford's boys across a low-walled, squarish patch of turf. "Watch this. I'm going to make a mistake on purpose. I'm going to tell both my units to fire on this group of enemies here, and totally ignore this group over here. And I'm going to try and flank them myself from this direction." So saying, Pitchford leaves his teams behind and hunches his way around the corner to his right. Spotting his ruse quickly, the ignored German unit reacts by moving to the left on the other side of the square. "Look - they're manoeuvring. They're flanking me in the other direction. I'm going to get my Assault team out of there, and there you go, they flanked me - they just killed my entire fire team." Clearly pleased with himself, Randy turns the whole battlefield around 180 degrees, manoeuvring his one remaining team around the square way until the Germans are on the opposite side. "See, totally dynamic."
The new AI smarts also call for a different approach to level design. Without the luxury of being able to pin the Nazis down to specific, dug-in positions, the levels have become more open and unimpeded. Choke points can now be approached from several different directions, meaning confrontations will play out very differently depending on the route you take. All things considered, you better hope they don't spot you first.
GO TEAM Clearly, the single-player game has pushed ahead into some exciting new territory. The gameplay promises to be far more lively and unpredictable than the first outing, bringing the series that much closer to its famous claims of authenticity. As you'd expect, the multiplayer side is also getting a spit-shine, but as well as enhancing the existing, competitive multiplayer mode with ten new missions and tweaked gameplay, Gearbox is developing that rarest of things, a two-player co-op mode.
The way it works is this: one player is Matt Baker, hero of Hill 30, and the other is Red Hartsock, new boy in town. Together they fight Nazis, each taking control of one squad of paratroopers. There's also another, completely separate set of German missions where you get to play the other side for a change.
As with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, the co-op mode required its own set of custom missions to make it work, though in this case there's no homoerotic grappling involved. Says Randy: "As far as I know we're the first WWII game ever to have a co-op feature, and that's really exciting, because this game is about brotherhood. It's all about soldiers fighting together."
Cunningly, the ten co-operative environments can each be played in a variety of ways to extend their longevity. The one we had a crack at was a bunker-style affair, in which you have to breach some enemy defences before blowing up an anti-aircraft battery. In the default mode, it's a straightforward objective-based mission, but you can also play it as a defend-the-hill style game, a time trial or a variety of other skill-based challenges. As Pitchford says: "It's different if you're attacking the bunker from if you're in the bunker."
While it's too early to pass judgement, the co-operative game seems a worthwhile addition to the series - our only complaint being that when you die, you have to sit around while your mate carries on. You either twiddle your thumbs until he dies, or you reset the mission. "It's tough, huh?" says Pitchford. "But we wanted that, we wanted a different kind of feeling in co-op. The other multiplayer mode is more about competition and fun - this is all about teamwork, and there's a certain tension that comes when there's no magic there. The idea, especially in the Tour Of Duty mode, is to see how many missions you can beat together without dying. If you can do 53 missions together, you're jammin'. And we're going to count that online so you can see who's gotten the farthest."
It seems like a reasonable idea. We would have preferred the option of playing through the single-player storyline in co-op, but it's certainly not a bad compromise. It also proves Gearbox isn't just cashing in with a weak follow-up too soon after the original game. There's real substance here, a lot more than in Road To Hill 30, and it's looking more and more like that game was just a warm-up.
It's always tricky to bring new weapons into a WWII series, given that you can only work within the realms of reality, but Earned In Blood nonetheless manages to produce a few new toys to keep the gun nuts happy. On the German side you get the FG42, a versatile scoped rifle carried by the Fallschirmjäger or German paratroopers. For the Yanks, you get the M3 'grease gun', a compact, rapid-fire SMG you might remember from Call Of Duty. "The M3 is a tanker weapon," says Randy Pitchford, "but as the war progressed the paratroopers got their hands on some of these things. Now that we're going beyond Hill 30 we can plausibly introduce these new weapons."
// SHELLSHOCK
One small but cool new tweak to the game is in the area of concussion effects when you're near an explosion. Depending on how close you are and the size of the blast, you'll now suffer a range of effects including blurred vision, ringing ears, loss of hearing and loss of co-ordination. In the most severe cases - say if a building explodes right under you - you'll actually be knocked off your feet and drop your weapon, forcing you to get up (after a brief incapacitation) and scramble around in the dust for your gun. Which can be most inconvenient when you're being shot at.
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