#295: Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30
The closest the mid-00s war shooter genre gets to feeling meaningful
This review was originally posted to Twitter on July 14, 2020.
Initial release: March 1, 2005
Platform: PlayStation 2, XBox, PC
Developer: Gearbox Software
There’s a lot of World War II games out there. The shooter genre especially seems to have the lion’s share outside of the strategy arena: Wolfenstein, Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Battlefield. But has any game ever leaned so hard on trying to deliver an emotional gutpunch like Gearbox’s Brothers in Arms series?
In the early 2000s, HBO’s Band of Brothers brought the gritty realism of Saving Private Ryan to televisions, relying heavily on the emotional investment of getting to know the characters over the course of ten episodes to the point of mourning their deaths. Brothers in Arms, as a series, is basically an ersatz video game adaptation of Band of Brothers (i mean, the name kinda gives it away!) set exclusively in the first week of the Normandy campaign. We open in medias res, seven days after D-Day, with you defending a position as it’s being assaulted. When a tank shows up and hits the trench you’re in, you’re stunned, and can only watch as one of your comrades stands up and dares the enemy to take him. He dies a violent death.
Then the game rewinds to the night before the landings. Over the next seven days, we get to witness the events that drove that man to the edge; seven days of intense fighting, seven days of blood and death among the nightmare mazes of the bocage hedgerows. We get to know the protagonist (voiced by Troy Baker!) and his comrades. Terrible things happen, characters we develop a liking for die, sometimes horribly. Every chapter where nobody dies feels like a victory; every character death feels like a defeat. This is as character-driven a game as war shooters can be, and all the better for it.
Of course, it’s not merely a series of cutscenes. You want that, go watch Band of Brothers. There’s also a game in here, but be warned, it’s not Call of Duty. the core gameplay is that you’re given command of up to two squads, and can direct them around the battlefield. By pointing at a group of enemies (marked by a red circle that turns grey as they’re suppressed by incoming fire) you can direct your troops to fire upon that position, or, if you feel like playing fast and loose with your guys’ health, you can order a direct assault. What this results in is a game that feels a little like a mix of a strategy game on top of the standard FPS layer. To add to that is a “situational awareness” mode, which pauses the game and pulls the camera up sky-high so you can get a sense of the battlefield. While it’s rather limited in what you can see, and you can’t direct your soldiers around, it’s still a useful tool for getting a rough idea of the battlefield layout and planning ahead. All in all, it’s a surprisingly robust system that improves on somewhat weak shooting.
True to the real-life weaponry of the war, your guns are pretty inaccurate — you can only reliably kill enemies up close. Only sniper rifles actually hit where the crosshairs point; the rest is a bit of a crapshoot, which forces you to rely on the squad system to flank and suppress. Thus I felt a little useless as an actual soldier and more useful as a tactician, moving my guys around and outmaneuvering the enemy. Regardless, it’s still an excellent twist on the usual World War II shooter gameplay, taking away some of the “Audie Murphy”-ness these games typically have.
Of course, gameplay and story segregation rears its ugly head here; deaths only matter in cutscenes. If one of your guys dies, he’ll be miraculously revived at the end of the chapter, or if you take the option to heal yourself and your team after multiple deaths and reloads. This is the only healing the game offers you, by the way — you otherwise must survive the whole level from start to finish with no healing. The levels are mostly mercifully short, however; the exception being the excruciating level “Push into Carentan.” This is an extremely long and difficult level filled with heavily armed troops, mostly carrying STG-44s which will tear you to shreds. Get past them and you’ll have to deal with not one, but two Panzer tanks with almost no cover, and with more enemy coming at you. Survive that, and you’ll have to assault a warehouse full of enemy, including not one but two MG42s that will one-hit kill you. In a game filled with otherwise decent level design that plays to the game’s strengths, this level is, in short, a dud.
Ultimately, though, in a world taken over by Call of Duty and Battlefield, Brothers in Arms is an underrated, forgotten classic, a franchise that seems to have been buried by Gearbox’s own incompetence. I’d love to see more… but we’ll probably just get more Borderlands.
