Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood
Bloody horrible.
Published: November 15, 2005
Everyone knows the World War II shooter is beyond played out. Everyone save for developers, it would seem, who continue to pump out based on the genre with an unwavering fervor. This, sadly, has clogged the market so much that it takes a game with a unique hook to stand out, but Gearbox seemed to find it with the PC version of the first Brothers in Arms game, Road to Hill 30, which mixed in simple squad commands and weapons that fired realistically.
The follow-up, Earned in Blood piggybacks off the characters and narrative from the first game to help thicken things up, and from a story perspective, it works pretty well, helping slip you comfortably into the shoes of one Joe "Red" Hartsock with solid voice acting and a unique way of presenting the missions.
Though the action is delivered via a first-person perspective (most of the time), this is not a standard FPS. In all honesty, it's more of a puzzle game than anything else, requiring regular presses of the select button to pause the game and pull the camera up into a birds-eye view of the action. You'll hop from group to group of enemies throwing down suppressing fire and then flanking them to finally get the kill.
Before we even get into why the command system fails miserably, I do want to point out that the game's unflinching adherence to making weapons fire like they were in the hands of the average gamer here can be a huge issue. It's one thing to have a weapon spray bullets everywhere while at a full sprint, but if it takes a trained soldier four shots to take down an enemy when he's kneeled and looking down the sights directly at their head, it just becomes frustrating.
You'll be doing this almost constantly, though, since firing from the hip just won't work (the crosshairs, which are more of a suggestion than a real indicator of targeting, are turned off by default). The game tries to give the illusion of a wide open battlefield, but in reality, there's usually only one direction to flank enemies from, and no matter how suppressed the enemy is (an indicator over their head goes from red to grey to indicate they're pinned), as soon as you get in line with them, they instantly become omniscient and spin to attack you, no matter how stealthy your approach.
It turns things less into a free-form set of battles and more of a pre-configured chess match, and though the game does offer a few memorable battles, the sequence of suppressing, flanking, firing semi-blindly despite looking down the crosshairs, and repeating gets old. You're not always stuck flanking, but trying to hit an entrenched enemy is nearly impossible from head-on, no matter how close your sights say you are.
If it sounds like the game is mainly a one-man-against-an-army scenario despite the whole team commanding dynamic, it's because it is. The squad AI makes the rest of your team seem like a bunch of blithering goddamn idiots, and that's the nicest thing I've called them. The game offers a relatively simple mechanic for using a context-sensitive reticle to paint where your squad should more to or fire at, but they'll rarely do this properly.
The follow-up, Earned in Blood piggybacks off the characters and narrative from the first game to help thicken things up, and from a story perspective, it works pretty well, helping slip you comfortably into the shoes of one Joe "Red" Hartsock with solid voice acting and a unique way of presenting the missions.
Though the action is delivered via a first-person perspective (most of the time), this is not a standard FPS. In all honesty, it's more of a puzzle game than anything else, requiring regular presses of the select button to pause the game and pull the camera up into a birds-eye view of the action. You'll hop from group to group of enemies throwing down suppressing fire and then flanking them to finally get the kill.
Before we even get into why the command system fails miserably, I do want to point out that the game's unflinching adherence to making weapons fire like they were in the hands of the average gamer here can be a huge issue. It's one thing to have a weapon spray bullets everywhere while at a full sprint, but if it takes a trained soldier four shots to take down an enemy when he's kneeled and looking down the sights directly at their head, it just becomes frustrating.
You'll be doing this almost constantly, though, since firing from the hip just won't work (the crosshairs, which are more of a suggestion than a real indicator of targeting, are turned off by default). The game tries to give the illusion of a wide open battlefield, but in reality, there's usually only one direction to flank enemies from, and no matter how suppressed the enemy is (an indicator over their head goes from red to grey to indicate they're pinned), as soon as you get in line with them, they instantly become omniscient and spin to attack you, no matter how stealthy your approach.
It turns things less into a free-form set of battles and more of a pre-configured chess match, and though the game does offer a few memorable battles, the sequence of suppressing, flanking, firing semi-blindly despite looking down the crosshairs, and repeating gets old. You're not always stuck flanking, but trying to hit an entrenched enemy is nearly impossible from head-on, no matter how close your sights say you are.
If it sounds like the game is mainly a one-man-against-an-army scenario despite the whole team commanding dynamic, it's because it is. The squad AI makes the rest of your team seem like a bunch of blithering goddamn idiots, and that's the nicest thing I've called them. The game offers a relatively simple mechanic for using a context-sensitive reticle to paint where your squad should more to or fire at, but they'll rarely do this properly.
