Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway
Review
Say hello to Stella!
by Chris Davis
reviewed on X360
Fire teams
Hell’s Highway adds to this formula with the introduction of a third fire team and different variations thereof. Whereas the first two games in the series only involved fire and assault teams and the occasional tank, this latest addition introduces the machine gun team, armed with a fearsome .30 Browning M1919, and the bazooka team. The Bazooka team is especially handy in situations in which your squad is pinned down by enemy fire from a weak cover position. As you would expect, this team can destroy light cover such as sandbags and vehicles.
While your fire teams will be doing almost all of the suppression fire on the German positions, at least 50% of the kills will come from the player. You will often find yourself in positions in which moving a team will get your men killed and thus requires you to take out the enemy. The controls are simple and don’t take much time to learn even though it does not adopt the standard Halo scheme. Commanding your squad is done with a pull of the left trigger and directing it at either a position or an enemy squad to fire upon.
While the campaign is an excellent experience to have, there is one critical area that really detracts from the overall Hell’s Highway experience: the multiplayer component. While there is a fair amount of different maps available, most games are plagued with lag and there is only one mode to play. I'm sorry, but I was under the impression that a deathmatch mode was a staple of the first person shooter. Overall the multiplayer experience feels very tacked on at the last minute and isn't worth playing for long. With two collection features to find throughout the game and a hard mode that completely removes the HUD, the replay value is increased somewhat, but it would have helped if the multiplayer would have received more attention.
Pushing the Front Forward
As the third entry in the franchise it is almost a requirement to create new gameplay elements and refine others that came before it. Several of these new features are anything but refined, as many have become staples of this generation. The first of which is one that is almost always present in a shooter nowadays: a cover system. The cover system could not be much simpler and involves walking over to an object and pressing a button. Controls for being in cover are actually better than most games however, as peaking out of cover is devoted to the left analog stick and the aiming on the right stick, whereas most other shooters devote it pretty much to the right stick. The addition of the cover system really changes things from the methods established previously in the series and strongly aids in tackling tough objectives.
Another new gameplay element is destructible cover. Objects such as fences, carts, and sandbag walls, previously all but invincible to even tank fire, can now be taken out depending on the material they are built with. As stated before, certain objects can only be taken out by explosives but a good majority of cover such as picket fences and wooden walls can be destroyed by gunfire. There are still objects that for some reason or another are invulnerable, such as some brick walls, but it is not a game killer.
Hell’s Highway abandons the health bar in favor of the typical Call of Duty health regeneration system. It seems that Gearbox understands the lack of realism in having such a system (logically I shouldn’t be able to finish a level after being hit by two hundred bullets) and has added a twist. Instead of allowing you to be a living repository for enemy fire, the game incorporates a 'one shot one kill' policy to players. When the screen begins to turn red, it is not an indication that the player is getting hit but rather that he is exposed and is drawing fire. When the screen has turned completely red and black you get shot and die right there. This works well and we wouldn't mind seeing this in other games.
8.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
