Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30
dev. Gearbox
Now available for Xbox, Playstation 2, and Windows PC.

Videogames based on World War II are at least as old as the original Castle Wolfenstein, way back in 1983. But since Steven Spielberg begat Medal of Honor for the Playstation in 1999 it's been a gravy train of first-person shooters. That series alone has spawned a dozen games, prompting competitors such as Call of Duty, Battlefield: 1942, and many more. All have followed in the footsteps of Saving Private Ryan, trying to put a gritty, sensory-overload gloss on familiar gameplay, while adopting Ryan's grave orchestral score and earnest, R-rated nostalgia.

Brothers in Arms is in similar territory. It's an M-rated game, which means bloody bodies and lots of hard-bitten profanity among the cast of soldiers. The music is the usual downbeat-glory stuff, and there are inescapable voiceovers in which the main character muses on the horror of war, the difficulty of command, and how you really get to know a man when you watch him die. In one voiceover he even loses it and starts screaming at the futility of it all, which is about the point that the game's reach exceeds its grasp and dislocates a shoulder.

Breaking with precedent for its genre, Brothers in Arms is a squad-based tactical game. It's a lot like Full Spectrum Warrior, except you control the squad leader at all times and can gun down Jerries at will. You order your fire team to lay down suppressive fire on the target and then deploy your assault team to flank the target and take them out. Or, as is more often the case, you do the flanking and the taking out yourself because your computer-controlled men are pretty bad at it.

This is where Brothers in Arms has problems. Full Spectrum Warrior did a very good job of putting your teams exactly where you told them to go; Brothers' squads aren't nearly so precise, and often one guy stands idly nearby, complaining about not seeing the enemy even as his teammates are unleashing all hell four feet away. Likewise, the assault team tends to die quickly when they make an assault, even when the target is properly suppressed.

The countryside of France is recreated convincingly, based on real battles and historical documents. A couple of real people turn up, including Medal of Honor winner Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cole, who pops up to lead his award-winning charge. Your team of guys is entirely fictional, however, and feebly so; this collection of friendly stereotypes gets more character development in the game manual than in the actual dialogue.

Brothers in Arms is a good game, and a definite cut above recent Medal of Honor titles. Despite its flaws, it still trumps Full Spectrum Warrior for overall fun. But I hope the sequel drafts some smarter AIs; these virtual citizen soldiers are all guts and no glory.