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Wage war (again) on Xbox. Also available for PC & PS2
Publisher: Ubisoft
Fri, 16 December 2005
by: Australian Ninja
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"Brothers in Arms" - I thought this was going to be a game about the band "Dire Straights." But I was wrong.
But what if it was? You could run around attacking people with an electric guitar and throwing those glow stick things at people. Fire out musical notes at enemies. Pass the level and be awarded the "Most Rockingest Guitar Hero" Medal. Yeah okay, a game like that would blow chunks.
Chunks of Rock 'n Roll that is. I can almost hear one person laughing at that comment. "On with the review you lunatic" I hear you yell at the computer screen. All-righty then.
Brothers in Arms is a First Person Shooter [FPS] based on -surprise surprise- events from World War Two. (Subtitled "Earned in Blood" this is the follow up to "Road to Hill 30"- Sammy). We get to be the Americans again hooray! It is a tough game to review because I'm really hopeless at playing it. I mean I like it, hell it's an impressive game on many levels. I just found it a really tough game to play and review.
The main emphasis in Brothers is on team work with Non Playable Characters [NPC's.] While this is acknowledged in other WW2 FPS's [Call of Duty and Medal of Honour series'] in Brothers it is an essential gameplay element. If you run off doing your best unstoppable psychotic Space Marine impersonation you will die. If you leave your team behind and fail to use real life tactics, then you will die. Get the picture?
The easiest way to explain it is that Brothers is the "Gran Turismo" of WW2 FPS's. It's more of a "simulation" game than an "arcade" style run 'n gun game. You will get out of it what you put into it. When you first play it you will most likely lose. Slowly your skills will increase and over time you will get better at playing it. It took me two days just to get to grips with the basic controls. The control scheme is well designed and intuitive to use. The application of the various tactics during battle though are complicated hence the steep learning curve.
Basically you control your own character plus a bunch of other soldiers that you get to order about. I like to order them to get my lunch for me. Run you scurvy dogs!
Through a simple control scheme you give orders to your fellow soldiers. Go here, attack that, lay cover / suppressing fire, follow me, and stay here. Simple enough. At first you get one team / unit. Later you get to control two teams at the same time. This gives you the option of laying cover fire with team one while team two attacks the enemy's position from the side or rear.
 | | Ritchie didn't like his chances without the Fonz backing him up |
The love and care lavished upon this game gets big respect from me. Big respect. Clearly this game is aimed at authenticity and the creators were pretty hardcore with their efforts. In the unlockable extras are over one hundred pictures of weapons, vehicles, photos of locations, photos of the team undergoing army training and more. Yes, I'm saying that the programmers, sound guys and the whole posse of game developers took basic army training to better understand how they would put their game together. They also trained in field battle exercises that re-created some of the battle scenes they designed for the game.
Some of the guns in the game were also fired to get the real firing sounds and match them with the game's sound.
Many of the significant buildings in the game were photographed then re-created in 3-D in with amazing results.
A quote suitable for this game could be "non-stop flanking action." Flanking is when one unit lays cover fire on an enemy's position while a second unit moves beside / behind the enemies "flanking" their position. This is the core gameplay that Brothers in Arms is built upon. As I said if you rush into enemy fire or ignore the team based tactics - you will die. This is where the game differs from other FPS's in that you must use realistic tactics and not arcade style "rushing" or brute force to subdue the enemy.
Each mission is played in a relatively large outdoor environment with enemies scattered in tactically advantageous positions.
The mission may have only a few enemies but as you kill some soldiers more appear. Unlike other games they do not run at you. They stay well covered behind fences, barns, valleys, grassy knolls and witness protection programs.
A unique feature in Brothers is the ability to zoom the camera miles out at any time giving an overhead strategic view of the entire battlefield. From here, you can pan the camera to focus on your men, objectives and enemy soldiers. Zooming to see where they are is not only encouraged, it is practically necessary to win. It almost sounds like cheating to have a camera that will show you where the enemies are. In practice it is not cheating but an integral strategy element that will be necessary to use at times if you are to succeed at the missions. Zooming the camera allows for proper planning and executing effective flanking manoeuvres.
Holy socks down the jocks Batman! Mere words cannot do justice in describing the high quality sound effects and sound mixing. As good as the gun sounds are in Call of Duty 2: Big Red One - in Brothers in Arms they are unbelievably better. The sound of the "pineapple" American hand grenade exploding is amazing. Just simply amazing to listen to. This was only on my TV with stereo sound. Through a mini-system or surround sound system it would have sounded even better.
I like to think that I have an eye [or ear] for detail. When I thought "No way, HOW could the sound in Brothers be better than COD2?" I just had to load up both games alternatively; fire the guns, and throw the grenades to see for sure if Brothers did in fact sound better. Look, the sound is just unreal. And not just for being realistic, but for being amazingly high quality sound overall for a video-game. Firing a gun in the air and then into the ground results in very different sounds. Such precise attention to detail is to be commended.
The sound in Brothers really shows the advances in video-game sound technology in just a few short years since Medal of Honour: Frontline. Still an incredible game now [I played it for a bit while I reviewed Brothers] but put well out to pasture by today's COD2 and Brothers.
A great example of the sound mixing is when at the start of one mission, a soldier is talking to you while an intense firefight cut-scene goes on. The soldier communicating with you is heard in bits and pieces. The sound mixing is so realistic that his shouting voice is drowned out by the gunfire. You get bits of sentences like talking to someone in a very loud nightclub. Well done to Ubisoft and Gearbox Software for maintaining such high quality product.
I could find no real faults with this game. Other than one, it is really hard. But then that is not a fault of the game, but a fault in me. The game is wonderful in its design. You just need to be patient in playing it and frankly I'm more of a rush and blast everything psycho than a patient battle tactician. [Note: for proof see my DarkwatchFPS review.]
The thing I'm getting at is that most casual gamers will be put off by the difficulty. But don't let that stop you from enjoying a great game. If I let frustration stop me, then I wouldn't have played many of the great games I have played in my life such as Zelda and Grand Theft Auto.
 | | I could swear that I've seen this exact same screenshot 10 billion times before |
Don't stress if the thought of a hard game scares you. There are different difficulty levels available and if you are patient you will progress through the game. But slowly. Do not expect to fly through the game in a few days. It won't happen unless you are hardcore and just play it all day for several days forsaking food, shelter and sanity.
If you take your time you will earn your stripes and find the game is fulfilling to play but slow moving in its stop and start nature. I am referring to the battles here, which are more about moving from cover to cover than running through levels. Sometimes the in-level objectives can be very confusing to achieve. A simple thing such as "return to church" had me wandering mindlessly until I accidentally stood on the exact one-foot-squared spot to trigger the next cut scene. Frustrating yes, but forgivable.
So like I said, no major faults in the game.
The game storyline I found mildly interesting, but the delivery in particular was what caught my attention. The voice acting is some of the best I have heard in any video-game. Quality voice acting that is comparable to the Metal Gear Solid series. The voice acting and personalities of the game characters are well developed. So well that the characters have depth to them and death has more consequence when it occurs during the game.
Brothers in Arms humanises the game characters / soldiers more than any other WW2 FPS I know of. The game's characters come across as human beings rather than polygon Average Joe's. Speaking of Joes' the main character is named "Sergeant Joe 'Red' Hartsock." The game's story is said to be based on a true story.
Probably the gun sounds, voice acting, story and character development is what most impressed me in Brothers. When a fellow soldier dies it has more meaning and consequence than other games I have played.
In the extras are very detailed profiles of the main characters from the game. Even letters to and from their families. It was unclear to me whether these were actual letters or ones made up for the game. They certainly read like real letters though and that further served to humanise the game's characters.
Brothers in Arms is certainly a nice looking game, but not that pretty compared to other Xbox games. For example the characters faces during the cut scenes look good, but during the game the faces look a bit plain.
The backgrounds are pretty but again not spectacular. I think more attention was spent on making the weapons look good and using lots of animation for the soldiers. So the soldiers, guns, vehicles are graphically detailed while the surroundings are not as pretty. However this is still a very high quality game and many of the building models are built from photo reference and have accurate textures. When a game has a lot of strengths it is easy to notice the lesser points, so really I'm nit-picking with my comments on the games looks. It doesn't look bad at all. Just the backgrounds to me seemed a bit bland at times.
I enjoyed playing Brothers in Arms. It has a lot going for it and the only thing that put me off a bit is the difficulty and steep learning curve. I recommend you rent it first to see if this game is for you. A unique game that puts a big emphasis on teamwork and effectively portrays the soldiers as real human beings who suffer pain and death and miss their families back home. Brothers supports online multiplayer and offline split screen mode. There are over forty-two missions for the one player game so you will be busy for a while. The "skirmish" mode has additional missions for one or two players in addition to the main storyline based one player game. Skirmish mode is basically playing extra levels with special requirements.
by: Australian Ninja
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More articles by Australian Ninja
An excellent game that requires patients to play. Superb voice acting and amazing sound. Best grenade explosion sound in a game...ever. | |
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