Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway

Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway – 1 Hour Demo Impressions

Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway is one of those WWII first-person shooters based on soldiers bonding through war. I was able to spend a good hour with the game thanks to Playstation Network Plus. Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway is an action game developed by Gearbox Software and published by Ubisoft. It originally released back on September 23, 2008  on the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. In case it slipped by you i played the one hour demo on my Playstation 3.

The main menu screen incorporated New Game, Chapters, Multiplayer, Options and Credits. I immediately went into Options and read the button layout via Dual Shock 3: L1-dig in, L2-alt fire/command, LS-look/crouch, D-pad-select item, Select-tactical map, R1-throw grenade, R2-fire weapon, RS-zoom, Start-pause/zoom. Without getting an in-depth analysis the controls sucked and so did the button layout. It felt like a chore to shoot people in Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway.

I choose New Game so i could spend the first half hour playing the story campaign. The opening cutscenes were aplenty. The year starts off at 1931 in Brighton Miss than 1944 in Normandy, France (the latter is the story from the previous game). More cutscenes ensue. Its obvious Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway was trying to convey a sense of family among its characters during WWII. The problem unfortunately is that this game hasn’t aged well on any fronts regarding presentation. After all of the cutscenes you are shown a prompt of whether you want the tutorial on or off. I choose off since this game was already quite painful to look at.

Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway is a WWII themed FPS centered around Americans versus Germans. You start off playing in a abandoned hospital in France. You do the basic FPS maneuvers like stealth, shoot a few guys until the end a cutscene shows one of the characters getting killed by a German soldier. After somemore cutscenes its three days before the events in the hospital you just played. I noticed during the opening cutscene two of the soldier’s faces used the exact same modeling features. What i’m trying to say i saw two soldiers standing next to each other who looked the exact same.

Lets look at the problems Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway had. Throughout the entire story campaign there was massive stuttering, slow-down, texture pop-in and slow loading. But what i disliked even more than all of that was the controls. They just felt so awkward compared to any FPS i played over the past few years. I could not get use to the controls for this game whatsoever. The game tries to pull you in with voiced narration, sweeping camera angles and below average visuals. The sound design was decent with good writing and voice acting which helped the story campaign. But overall shoddy presentation and a static lackluster atmosphere.

After spending half of my time in single player i decided to see if people played this game online still. They did surprisingly. The Multiplayer menu consisted of Online Game, Local Area Game, Join/Host Game.Maps included Town Center, Light House, Industrial. The sides are American versus German. The main gamemode is called Defend/Attack capture style of game. The cool thing about multiplayer in Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway is the fact you can drive tanks. The tanks are easy to operate actually. Most of the multiplayer is standard. You can choose a different loadout etc. The connection issues and spawn killing pretty much ruined the multiplayer for me when it was all said and done

Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway is extremely dated on practically all fronts. It just  shows some games do not age well. This game was boring and a whole bunch of performance issues involved with it. The controls i just hated. Thanks for reading.