Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 Review
March 24, 2005 by Scott Parrino
You sprint towards the corner house at the end of the street, your two squads hot on your heels. Suddenly, you hear the deadly sound of an MG42 positioned at the house window. Quickly you put your fire team behind some cover and have them suppress the machine gun. M1 Garands and a BAR pound rounds towards the machinegun. Sweat pours down your face as you take your assault team around the house for a flanking position. Gunfire erupts in the form of a German infantry squad impeding your process. It�s time to decide and position your men, but will it cost valuable lives, or even your own?
Find, Fix, Flank, Finish
I have been waiting patiently for Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 to come out since its inception. All I can say is that it was very much worth the wait. In fact, I can�t wait to play it again, and again, and again.
The basic premise of BiA is that you are Sergeant Matt Baker of the 101st Airborne. As part of the airborne landings on D-Day, you will command your men for the next eight days through skirmishes and battles that end with the battle on Hill 30. It is the events and experiences in those eight days that provide the background for what kind of person Baker is like, as well as the men under his command as well as above him.
Playing BiA is pretty much like your standard FPS. You got your keyboard controls, the standard WASD movement, and your trusty mouse with the left button as your trigger, and other commands and controls. On your screen you have a compass to show where to go for objectives, as well as the location of your teams. That is where it ends there. As you advance towards Hill 30, you will gain men and armor to control in battle. You tell them where to go, what unit to fire at and suppress, or even when to charge. It�s this feature that gives you the feeling that you are of a high rank as a soldier and still in the thick of battle. However, don�t think you�re unstoppable as a soldier; in fact you�re just as likely to die as easily as your enemy. You can�t run fast or strafe quickly side to side to avoid bullets. You need to seek cover and find the enemy quickly before they concentrate on you.
This is where you must learn strategy. Under your command, at certain times, you�ll have two teams a fire team and an assault team. Each team has their advantages and disadvantages. Your fire team, once you locate the enemy, is to put suppressing fire on them while your assault team moves about their flank to take them out. This is called the four F�s: Find, Fix, Flank, Finish. You Find the enemy, you Fix him with fire, and you Flank him with your assault team, and Finish the enemy. It is this simple formula that you must keep in mind when you go out to fight or else you�ll take losses. And don�t think that formula is something only you can use, the Germans know how to fight as well! Staying in one spot and not making any actions against the enemy will allow him to keep you pinned and flank you, so keep your eyes and ears open around and don�t be an easy target.
Now this may seem tough to swallow all at once, but luckily the command usage for this is pretty simple. Your right mouse button brings up a context sensitive cursor on your screen that you aim like you do with your weapon. Pointing it at a location will order your men to go there. The amazing thing is that they just don�t run there blindly, they will approach their destination so that they are near cover, and when they do reach their destination, they�ll take up positions of cover. Putting your cursor on the enemy and releasing it will tell them to fire at the enemy to suppress them, and holding the right mouse button and clicking the left mouse button will have them charge the enemy. However, this last option is dangerous to use, as your men will charge out into the open, leaving them vulnerable. I recommend only using this command when the enemy is completely suppressed and there are no other threats in the area. Pressing Shift will select between your two teams you have under your command. Your Z and X buttons work as having your team fall in on you or fall out respectively to take cover. Another thing you�ll notice when you start playing is that the crosshair option is off by default. By pressing E you bring up your iron sights, aiming down your rear and front sights, and you get a slight zoom. This is tough to manage, but you get the hang of it after a while and it�ll become second nature.
When dealing with the enemy, you�ll see a red circle appear over their heads. This represents the amount of suppression you have on the enemy. A full red circle means they are a potential threat and are not suppressed. Having your teams fire on them will cause the red circle to fill up to gray, showing that they are being suppressed. You need to keep an eye on these cues as you move your teams, as an unsuppressed German unit will notice you and fire on you with ease!
A neat feature in BiA is the Situational Awareness function. Pressing V on your keyboard will bring up a view of the battlefield around you. With this you can see your threats, your objectives, where your men are located, etc. Some may say this is cheating, but before the soldiers jumped from the planes, they had extensive knowledge of the area they were jumping in with extensive maps. With this, you can see where it is possible to flank the enemy and place your teams for effective use.
I�m pretty sure you want to know about the weapons and how they are in BiA. All I can say is just incredible. I have fired some weapons in my lifetime, and seen live demonstrations of some of the weapons used in BiA and they sound and act authentically. The M1 Garand is your main rifle that is best used for your long-range shots and your M1 Carbine is a mix of pistol power and rifle power, best for shorter ranges. My personal favorites, the Thompson Submachine gun and BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle) are best used in suppression or assaulting the enemy. There is nothing more satisfying then the rat-tat-tat of your Thompson and watching your bullets pelt the enemy and kicking up dirt and pockmarks. Of course, if you ever run out of ammo, (trust me, you will) you can pick up German weapons like the Karabiner 98, the bolt action rifle, the MP40, which is like the Thompson but instead of a 20 round clip, you get 30 rounds, and my personal favorite, the StG44, the powerful assault rifle. Each of these weapons has their strengths and weaknesses that you must not only exploit on your end, but also against the enemy.
As you�ll advance, you�ll start facing tougher opposition in the form of infantry, fixed positions, and armor. When you first land and assault your objectives, they�re guarded by Ost Troops, which are pretty much inexperienced conscripts used to fill in holes in the line or to absorb the attack while experienced troops counter-attack. But by the second and third day, you�re facing experienced German soldiers with better weapons and understanding of tactics. Facing armor is also scary too, as they�re armed not only with machineguns, but a gun as well. Your best bet against them is to find cover, fast! Once you can asses your situation, you can either use armor under your control, or find a bazooka or panzerfaust, or if you�re feeling dangerous, get behind the tank and get on top of it to drop a grenade down the hatch.
My only gripe I have about the game play was that if one of your soldiers were to die in a mission, they come back at the beginning of the next mission until they are scripted to die. While this keeps the story going along, it ruins continuity. It also ruins the sense of worth your men are in battle, as you don�t� have to worry about losing them permanently. But when your soldiers have scripted deaths, you�ll lose them then and you�ll notice that you get short-handed in the later battles, which presents a challenge in its own way. The difficulty of BiA depends on your settings. The easier the setting, the more hits you can take, and the dumber the AI is, and if you have save spots. On Authentic difficulty (the hardest), you get no suppression icons and no save spots through missions. The AI is significantly more difficult as well.
Incredible Visuals
The graphics of BiA are pretty impressive. While they�re not like Doom 3 or Half-Life 2 quality, they utilize the Unreal engine to effectively detail war and your soldiers. On high detail, you�ll see swaying grass, reflective pools of water, and a glowing hue of the sky much like Full Spectrum Warrior. The uniforms are done quite well, and over time, they get dirtier and worn out.
That is what most impressed me about BiA. It has a feeling of being worn in and used. When you first jump, your men are wearing face paint, clean-shaven, their uniforms all nice and tidy. By the eighth day, your men are sporting grizzled looks, unshaven, and their uniforms are worn out. In fact, everything has this look, down to the weapons. You actually feel like you are in a war, down on the ground and fighting through dirt and mud. There are other neat effects in BiA that add to the sensation of �being there�. There will be times where it�s raining and raindrops will get in your vision, much like real life. Other times a grenade will go off near you and you�ll get dirt and mud in your eyes, or you�ll take a bullet and blood will spray on your face. It doesn�t cloud your vision completely and it goes away after a few moments. If you�re too close to the business end of an artillery round or grenade, you�ll get knocked down and you�ll slowly stand up, the world around you fuzzy and slightly muted. This happens rarely, as you�ll be pretty vulnerable at this point and more often if you�re that close to a grenade or artillery round, you�re close to death.
The gore and death represented in BiA is done well. Blood spurts on walls when you shoot an enemy, or you�ll see blood puffs spray up as well. They�ll fall to the ground ala-rag doll style, or if you threw a grenade, you get the pleasure of seeing their body fly up and conform to what ever they hit. You don�t get to see detailed wounds on the enemy, although there are times you�ll encounter dead cows or horses with guts hanging out, or an unlucky soldier you see while moving through with his throat torn open and blood running down his face. When your men die in scripted events, it is devastatingly realistically done. One such example is that while on a bridge, a Stuka dive-bomber bombed it. After you came to, you see one of your men laying on the ground, his body torn in two with his spine sticking out, his guts a mess, and his eyes staring into nothingness.
The surrounding environment is something to boast about. Gearbox Software took a year researching and creating the maps in BiA to match the layout that was seen by the soldiers on D-Day. They painstakingly copied maps, surveillance photos and the like to create small towns, the bocage, and the farms in France. While some places were edited to appeal to game play, what you see in the game was actually there in D-Day rather than a made from scratch map.
Explosions and other such weapon-inflicted damage on the environment look great. Grenades through up a bunch of dirt or grass while bullets create a dust puff that hang in the air. Unfortunately, there isn�t a lot of physics for objects in BiA, so you can�t shoot around a glass bottle or send some rifles flying. It doesn�t hurt the experience, but with the direction games are going, having a more physics on the engine would be welcome. All these graphics come at a price though. Running at full detail will push your rig to the max. My P2.0, 1Gig of RAM and 256mb video card was having a hard time running at 1024x768 with full detail, so that can tell you how demanding the graphics can be for BiA. I recommend turning down the detail to at least get 30 frames a second or more so that you can get smooth game play.
World War 2 On Your Speakers
This is always my favorite part since I got 5.1-surround sound. The sound detail in BiA is very well done down to the voice acting. The weapons each have their distinct noise and sound like the genuine deal. My personal favorite sound was the MG42, as it has a unique sound that will send you scurrying for cover and fear it. The Garand itself gives a heavy bass sound with each round you send flying while the BAR will rumble your speakers with continuous heavy firepower. If you are able to, put your speakers on high volume and enjoy the madness.
Explosions don�t send like over-exaggerated explosives going off in action movies. Some have a sharp sound to them with the sound of falling dirt and debris following it. Artillery rounds and mortars will come down with a satisfying noise of high explosives; if you hear a whistle and a short pause, that�s when you know it is going to hit close! Take advantage of the sound of BiA so that you know what you�re going up against and where to take cover.
The voice acting is pretty well done. Baker seems to have a soft quietness to him as you listen to him speak in between missions. On the field, he�ll shout and give orders like a real Sergeant. Other voice actors give personality and humor to the characters, especially Privates Allen and Garnett. This makes you feel as if you�re actually around real people, real soldiers, rather than NPCs that are just cannon fodder. When you lose your men, you�ll feel it on the inside.
Multiplayer Goodness
The multiplayer aspect of BiA stays true to its tactical feeling. At max there are 4 players in a game, with each player controlling a squad. Strategy and tactics still remain, as there are fire and assault teams with their assortment of weapons. You must work together as a team to find your objectives, which range from taking out AA guns to protecting bridges or preventing the delivery of orders.
You can choose to play as the Americans or Germans with their full set of weapons or any you pick up from a dead soldier. The commands and orders stay the same as in BiA, so it is best to get a firm grip on those before hitting the servers.
Some servers however, have players that are more for finding the enemy and playing it in a death match sort of style. Thankfully it doesn�t degrade quickly as the players will learn that that kind of approach is suicidal. When you have a teammate that works together with you, the fun truly comes to light as your work on flanking your enemy. The maps are fun as well, which are big enough to allow flanking movements, but small enough so that no one can get lost. Your compass arrows point to objectives as well as your teammate to keep your bearings. Just remember, human players are unpredictable, so be prepared!
Enlist Today!
Overall I was very impressed with Brother in Arms: Road to Hill 30. The experience I had with this game is something that I will remember for a long time. It feels like you are part of a Band of Brothers series with the quality of work done here. By the time I was done playing, I wanted more. I replayed again on a harder difficulty and kept playing more and more. The more you play on the harder levels, the more goodies you unlock, with cheats, behind the scenes, and other such extras.
BiA has seated itself on the shelf as a game that brought more to the table of the WW2 FPS and you�ll definitely hear more about it in the future, since there are rumors of an add-on or a sequel! Don�t delay! Get your copy today!
