Review: Brothers In Arms Hell’s Highway
The Brothers in Arms series has offered some of the most compelling takes on the WWII shooter genre, mixing in a healthy blend of squad mechanics, as well as some excellent story elements. Now, developer Gearbox has launched the fourth proper entry to the series, Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway. Hell’s Highway plays up the series’ strengths quite nicely, offering intuitive squad elements and great action, as well as a compelling storyline. While there are some issues with the game, including problematic AI, it still stands as a solid entry to the series and worth a look for fans of WWII shooters.
In Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway, you once again fill the heavy shoes of Sgt. Matt Baker as he commands his units through Operation Market Garden, a risky move that pushed military forces through Holland and into Germany in an effort to end the war before Christmas 1944. The story focuses heavily on Sgt. Baker and the toll that has been done to his emotional and mental state throughout his tour of duty, and does an excellent job of adding seriousness and emotional gravity to the game’s plot.
Like its predecessors, Hell’s Highway is a first-person shooter with squad command elements. You’ll be able to command squad groups around the map, getting them to suppress enemies with fire, allowing you to flank their position and move in for the kill, as well as move to different locations. Another element that comes into play is the destructible cover system. Some objects that can be used for cover, like barrels or wooden tables, can also be destroyed if hit with enough firepower. Therefore, you can command your units to focus their attacks on your enemy’s cover, breaking it and exposing them to fire.
Your individual squads will each have their own strengths in battle, as well. You’ll have squads that are better at laying suppressing fire, as well as bazooka units, leading you to utilize a bit of strategy when giving out orders to your different units.
While you do have access to squad commands in the game, it is primarily an FPS, and features some great mechanics. The cover system works quite well, similarly to Rainbow Six: Vegas, as you’ll be able to find cover in a variety of objects throughout the environment. Once you move into a cover position, the game will switch to a third-person perspective, from which you’ll be able to fire at enemies while avoiding gunfire.
The game does have some issues that prevent it from being a truly great WWII shooter, namely the often problematic AI. Your enemies will often perform some screwy actions, including popping out of cover for no reason, or just generally leaving themselves out there to get shot. However, the biggest problem with the AI comes from your squadmates. Although the game states that your squadmates are soldiers and therefore will react to enemies and find cover whenever necessary, you’ll find yourself doing a fair amount of handholding in order to keep your teammates out of harm’s way, otherwise they’ll get wiped out fairly quickly.
Additionally, ordering your troops around can be a hassle when the action gets hairy. You can be pinned down by enemy fire and try to get your squad to suppress your foes, only to accidentally order them to run out of cover and getting taken out. This happened to me more than a few times, and became quite frustrating.
Graphically, the game looks very good, utilizing the Unreal Engine 3 to some great results. The character models look great and showcase some varied emotions. The environments are also great looking, offering tons of details and destruction effects.
The sound is also done very well. The voice work and dialogue sounds very good, and the soundtrack is dynamic and changes when the action gets intense.
Hell’s Highway is a welcomed addition to the series, bringing some fine new elements to the series’ successful blend of compelling narrative and squad-based gameplay. While there are some problems, including spotty AI and rough squad controls, the game is still a solid title for fans of WWII shooters.
Join StealthGamers Community
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
The Gamer
Who is the gamer? or what makes him such? Can a person be defined as a gamer?
In china a few years ago, I read online, a group of boys got together, hunted down, and killed another boy because, online, in a game, he’d found and killed one of these boys, who, unfortunately had found a very rare ‘object.’ and his death, had meant they’d lost it.
The really scary thing was that this wasn’t an isolated event, and the story was actually about measures that the Chinese gov. was taking to prevent this sort of crime, by making the net more anonymous.
I’m not sure if these people can be called gamers, because the rest of the article also dealt with people who were, clinically, addicted to the internet.
The idea of the gamer used be of this social misfit, someone who can’t quite be cool, or even accepted in the real world, and so he escapes to this alternate one, where is the top cat. Typically, these would be seen as wimps, sissies, geeks, or any similar social stereotype that was a misfit.
Later when society started moving towards being more and more electronic, and spending hours staring at a screen became part of job descriptions, and not really that weird, gaming came to be a little more accepted. It was a legitimate pass time.
But obsessive gamers were still not quite regarded as socially normal.
Now gaming is coming to be recognized as a professional sport, and you have to wonder what kind of sportsmen these are… they definitely don’t fit the macho image that sportsman have.
Nor do they spend the time they’re not staring at screens blinking at the ‘bright light’ around them. They may not be hunks running on testosterone but they’re definitely not diminutive either, and if you want competitive spirit, they’ll give the Australian cricketers a run for their money.
Which once more leaves me asking, where exactly do gamers fit in? More on this later.
Join StealthGamers Community
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
FIFA 09
The torrents are out, and so I’m guessing the gaming has become.
The game has come good on many of its promises during development, and most reviews have been favourable, a few features that were singled out for specific praise were the better graphics, and player control. Players are both more responsive, and faster, making for more fluid gameplay, which is supported by more complete graphics. This means that the ball, and the players relation to it, is clearer to see, and more realistic. Like for example a player now can be seen turn around to receive the ball, and contorting his body to receive the ball, instead of just finding at his feet. This feature combined with the more real physics of the game, (a feel for momentum etc.) means that some new things are possible, like a tackled player, if he is not tackled on his weight bearing leg, can hop over, and carry on.
Another new feature is the ‘Be a Pro’ mode, which carries forward, the earlier, RPG like, gameplay(you chose one player, and stuck with him for the whole game) to another level, where you can take a player and be him for four seasons, shaping his stellar career so to speak.
The ‘tactics’ of the game are said to have become deeper, you can now change tactics on the fly, somewhat like changing defense in the earlier NBA games. So now you can change from playing long, aerial balls forward to a more compact, shorter game, with just the tap of a button. To compliment this, the AI has been made sharper, which means the opposition is better too.
The game on the whole is said to compare well with its competitors on the market, and with the better, faster graphics, and more realistic game play, including better shoving, runs, and in general more realistic action, it is slated to do well. What has been criticized is the slow pace of the game, and the super humanity of the keepers, that seem able to pull of virtually impossible saves with the least trouble.
Join StealthGamers Community
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Why the Need for Speed
I’m a big fan of the NFS series, I know, everyone says they’re better racing games out there, with better races, better storylines and better… well pretty much everything, and I might even concede.
Right now, though, I don’t know what’s wrong with the NFS Team. I mean, their best game ever was underground 2, and since then they seem to be in a downward spiral. The things that made UG2 were its storyline, and the things you had to do beyond the racing. Like all the points you needed to rack up for style, the magazine shoots, the DVD covers, it created a good, ‘underground’ feel to the whole thing.
But the next two installments just sort of destroyed that. I’m not sure which came fist, Carbon or Most wanted, but both disappointed. Most wanted had pretty much the same story that UG2 does, with a slight variation, and so did Carbon, with slight variations, in which parts of the story they tell, and the women.
Then the actual racing: in Most Wanted the tracks are fine, and really interesting, though being day light does take away significantly from the look. The cars are pretty much the same, I think… but what really disappoints are the visual mods. They’re almost non existent. Well what’s the point of visual mods in a racing game you might ask… well what’s the point of having to wrestle with police cars in a racing game, I’ll answer. If the idea is to create the image of a lifestyle, real or imagined, things have to be consistent, street racers believe in bling… and unfortunately Most Wanted did not. The required number of felons to get through is another thing I didn’t quite understand, I mean as an idea they were fine, but the speed with which the requirements escalate… and why they cant just be cumulative?
Anyway, Carbon kind of went to the other end, pure racing, only racing, and nothing but racing. The next big thing of customizable mods fell flat for me… because of firstly the degree of customization offered, and second they weten’t that many mods anyway. I mean you couldn’t take a mod and change it around, turn is upside down, or sideways… it was way to straight jacketed to actually be creative with.
The other thing in both these installments that I found really disappointing is that neither have the many new races they’d brought in with UG2. Street X, Drags, and Drift, these made for interesting variations on the standard start and stop racing ideas. I really was looking forward to more of them.
I’ve not yet played Pro Street, so I can really say much, but I get the feeling that once more, the reality of racing has been stressed at the cost of the image of racing, which is why a gamer is drawn to the game. If we want real racing, we’ll just hit the road!
Join StealthGamers Community
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Gambler Ruler
Deciding which online casino to play in isn’t an easy task. With literally tens and hundreds of casinos around how do you come to know the best ones. The site is GamblerRuler.com and it gives you great reviews of casinos. Which casinos are good and which ones aren’t? Well here is a site which tells you the way it actually is. So here you get a ratings guide to the online casinos on the web.
What’s great about them? Well they say their team has been wagering at online casino sites since 1998 that obviously means great experience. The way it works is real simple. You see the review of the casino on their site. Simply download the software and play for real money. So effectively as a user you can get great quality news, tips and reviews of online casinos. They have also partnered with some of the best online gaming operators for years.
Gambleruler.com also has a great tutorial and tips section. From Online Casino Operators… to Slots Glossary - Learn … to Five Hot Slots Tips..to. Progressive Jackpots - you get it all here. Overall a great site for casino lovers.
Join StealthGamers Community
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Gaming is Dead
I don’t mean that games these days are badly made, or nor made at all. In fact I am fully aware of the growing realism in games, and the enjoy-ability of games. What I mean is that the reason people used to game is dead.
Games began as idle pass times, in bars and restaurants, or in malls. They were meant as mere diversions for the idle mind or the restless child; they were temporary, designed with the very idea of taking one away from reality, into a world of almost deliberate lameness. Games like Galaxia or the original Ping ball, were not meant to capture the imagination, but in fact dulled it.
Today games are nothing like that; they are alternatives to reality, made with such precision and care to be addictive, and to dull the sensations of reality. Reality itself is seen as a distraction.
Gaming is now a professional sport, technology is created to cater to its requirements. The industry responsible for creating them is one of the fastest growing ones, and already amongst the biggest in the entertainment segment. And influence other fields of entertainment, with animation series being made of games, and movies too.
Gaming is nothing like what it used to be. Gaming like everything else, has grown, and the manner in which Pac Man is seen today, as a grand classic that set it all in motion, would perhaps stagger the man who created him. For Pac Man, an icon of the past was created with motives entirely different to that of those to revere him today.
Or perhaps gaming has not really changed that much either. Perhaps all Pac Man and Air Hockey wanted to achieve was to collect a few quarters and nothing more. Perhaps gaming has become more efficient.
Join StealthGamers Community
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!