[Ubidays 2007] On Hell's Highway
We finally get a peek of an actual real-time version of Gearbox's new Brothers in Arms game.
Published: May 23, 2007
Blame the fact that the PS2 versions were always inferior in every way, but we never did dig the Brothers in Arms series all that much. Oh, we totally dug the idea of setting up a tactical system for flanking enemies and slowly moving your squad into position to ambush the enemy or keep them pinned down until someone could hit them from the sides or behind, it's just that when it finally game time to look down the iron sights of whatever weapon we were holding, it always seemed to take a billion shots to put the enemy down.
That, combined with the idea that each level was really just a series of pre-set puzzle moves, of obvious areas to flank and attack even if it seemed like you should just be able to lob a grenade over those sandbags and be done with it, just made the game seem like you were always progressing through the level exactly as developer Gearbox Software wanted you to, which to us was never all that fun. Well good news: Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway makes a lot more sense now.
Oh, you still have to constantly find cover (you can now snap to it with a single button press, which in turn pulls the camera out to a third-person perspective, letting you take the area in from a slightly more strategic perspective -- handy because the old omniscient view to plan things where you knew enemy positions before you got there is gone now, replaced instead by a simple map that points the way with basic recon. From here you can fire off shots (and each one arcs out with a little snaking trail of smoke and some light heat distortion), or, if you're smart, you'll order suppressing fire and do the ol' flank and attack move -- which now actually feels like it's doing something when you sight a target and squeeze the trigger.
But this is a next-gen game, and finally you can use basic real-world reasoning on things. No longer is that fence the enemy is hiding behind made from bulletproof Kevlar. Now, if your enemy has been stupid enough to grab soft cover, you can just chip away at it with sustained fire; the wood will splinter and eventually start revealing German hide to take shots at. Or, better still, call in your bazooka man and introduce that fence to the concussive force of a rocket. Either way, the same thing goes for you, so thinking on the fly is far more important here.
This was demonstrated in whole by a short little romp through the Dutch village of Zon, a stop along the ultimately unsuccessful Operation Market Garden where the 101st Airborne were trying to slip through the beautiful but dangerous little burg. What started in a garden with familiar flanking maneuvers eventually morphed into an example of what the beefy PC hardware was capable of (it's the series' natural home, after all, but at least it wasn't running on the 360 like most of the other games at the event).
We got to see nice little slo-mo grenade explosion, the game's new system for indicating that you're just a clean shot away from death while out of cover (the whole world goes red), and fights both outside and indoors. An extensive library skirmish was capped off with a flashback from leading man Matt Baker spotting a pair of eyeglasses and, in a final show of the level of destruction in the game, a little machine gun emplacement-aided chipping away at a statue in the courtyard the library overlooked.
If the console versions can look as good while running as smooth as the PC demo we saw, this could finally be the BIA game that makes us all change our minds about the series. Only time will tell, but as soon as we actually see it running on console hardware, we'll let you know how things are shaping up.
That, combined with the idea that each level was really just a series of pre-set puzzle moves, of obvious areas to flank and attack even if it seemed like you should just be able to lob a grenade over those sandbags and be done with it, just made the game seem like you were always progressing through the level exactly as developer Gearbox Software wanted you to, which to us was never all that fun. Well good news: Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway makes a lot more sense now.
Oh, you still have to constantly find cover (you can now snap to it with a single button press, which in turn pulls the camera out to a third-person perspective, letting you take the area in from a slightly more strategic perspective -- handy because the old omniscient view to plan things where you knew enemy positions before you got there is gone now, replaced instead by a simple map that points the way with basic recon. From here you can fire off shots (and each one arcs out with a little snaking trail of smoke and some light heat distortion), or, if you're smart, you'll order suppressing fire and do the ol' flank and attack move -- which now actually feels like it's doing something when you sight a target and squeeze the trigger.
But this is a next-gen game, and finally you can use basic real-world reasoning on things. No longer is that fence the enemy is hiding behind made from bulletproof Kevlar. Now, if your enemy has been stupid enough to grab soft cover, you can just chip away at it with sustained fire; the wood will splinter and eventually start revealing German hide to take shots at. Or, better still, call in your bazooka man and introduce that fence to the concussive force of a rocket. Either way, the same thing goes for you, so thinking on the fly is far more important here.
This was demonstrated in whole by a short little romp through the Dutch village of Zon, a stop along the ultimately unsuccessful Operation Market Garden where the 101st Airborne were trying to slip through the beautiful but dangerous little burg. What started in a garden with familiar flanking maneuvers eventually morphed into an example of what the beefy PC hardware was capable of (it's the series' natural home, after all, but at least it wasn't running on the 360 like most of the other games at the event).
We got to see nice little slo-mo grenade explosion, the game's new system for indicating that you're just a clean shot away from death while out of cover (the whole world goes red), and fights both outside and indoors. An extensive library skirmish was capped off with a flashback from leading man Matt Baker spotting a pair of eyeglasses and, in a final show of the level of destruction in the game, a little machine gun emplacement-aided chipping away at a statue in the courtyard the library overlooked.
If the console versions can look as good while running as smooth as the PC demo we saw, this could finally be the BIA game that makes us all change our minds about the series. Only time will tell, but as soon as we actually see it running on console hardware, we'll let you know how things are shaping up.
