15 November, 2008

Review: Brothers In Arms: Road to Hill 30

Sigh. I wanted to love Brothers In Arms like I loved Opposing Force and Blue Shift. But I don't. It tries hard to be respectful to the source material, to the men and the history. But it's obvious they couldn't realize their ambition. The voice acting is pretty good, but the direction is poor, making the characters seem wooden and fake.

Moreover, the AI is so broken that I can't take any of it seriously at all. I shot an enemy soldier who was standing in a corner, running in circles. I imagined him emitting Curly style whooping noises as I shot him. Also, my men would regularly stand in the open. I'm supposed to care about these men. They're supposed to be my family. But when they display no regard for self preservation that illusion doesn't work. Also, they frequently refuse to fire on targets they should have no problem firing on. Sometimes it's because they won't move three feet to the corner of a wall without explicit instructions. Sometimes it's because they're behind a wall that's scripted to be too tall to fire over, even though enemies on higher ground are clearly visible and shooting them.

There are other reality bending minutiae, like bullets coming out of guns at weird angles and AI that can shoot you with total accurately through obscuring foliage, that make it impossible to suspend disbelief. The sequel, Earned in Blood, fixes none of these things. Based on the review scores and limited podcast discussion I've heard, it sounds like the recently released third game in the series also doesn't work for most people.

And it's not just about the lack of "realism". The game is generally pretty frustrating to play, as well. Sometimes enemies spawn next to you and you're instantly dead. Sometimes unsuppressed enemies can hit you from super far away, further than you can suppress them from. Sometimes I found myself facing three enemy elements with only one friendly element backing me up. How do you pin three enemy elements to move up in those circumstances? You don't.

And as I've mentioned before, the fact that your troops only follow the shortest path between where they are and where you tell them to go means they have be treated like Amelia Bedelia, rather than combat veterans who know about fields of fire, using cover, etc. Also, giving the command I wanted to was often difficult to give. I'd be trying to point at a bad guy, but I'd get the movement cursor. A few times this meant my men broke cover and ran to their deaths when I wanted them to suppress a target. Essentially, the core mechanic is tedious and unreliable in a game that harshly penalizes mistakes.

As I said, I wanted to love this game. Gearbox is working on Aliens: Colonial Marines, and Borderlands, both sci-fi co-op games. I want them to be great. Based on Brothers In Arms, I'm no longer holding out much hope for those games.

Designers need to be monstrously ruthless about admitting what's broken and finding ways to fix it. I think the industry term is "killing your own babies". I'd like to believe that the people at Gearbox simply don't have the stomach for it. Because the only other options I can see are that they're oblivious to the game's flaws, or not capable of doing better. I'd prefer to think that they're simply "too nice" to make a great game.

3 of 5

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