Brothers in Arms- Road to Hill 30 (DVD-ROM) Description:

Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 (DVD-ROM) review:
5 stars (Great Immersion, Unsuitable Language For Some) - Never bought a WWII title before, and I had heard good things about this title, so I figured I would give it a try.



Gameplay is very intuitive, controls are easy to master in a short period of time. Until you figure out the little things that help succeed in a mission, you can end up doing a mission over several times.



Good graphics - great immersion between graphics, sound, and the stress of trying to complete a mission with bullets whizzing by you.



ONE thing...In striving for realism, there is some offensive language. I am sure that soldiers on D-Day weren't saying "Golly Gee - someone is shooting at me", so I get their drift. But the truth is, be prepared for it...It starts during the opening scenes. You will hear F***,A**h***, and S*** during the game. There are a few gruesome bodies in the game, but nothing major.



All in all, a great game, but not for children, and not for those who don't want that language coming from their speakers.
5 stars (A great game indeed!) - If you want a realistic WWII game, then buy this one. If you want a simple run-'n-gun shooter, then look elsewhere. You won't be charging around killing scores of enemies within minutes either (but you will kill enough to satisfy your trigger finger!). The utter authenticity and feels-like-you're-there atmosphere is absolutely amazing, as is some of the blood and gore one might witness in combat (during certain chapters of the game). But even when you see some of your comrades simply lying still and dead on the ground ahead of you, this game really makes you feel for them -- along with somewhat better understanding the waste of human life that occurs during war. A great game indeed!
2 stars (Some good points, but disappointing.) - Overall, my sense of this game is that if it had come out before Call of Duty it would have been considered ingenious. If Call of Duty 2 integrates squad-based features into its already fantastic game play, then there is no purpose for Brothers in Arms. Game play in BIA is my most serious complaint. It is not immersive and after awhile not even interesting. The game's depiction of Normandy is actually quite realistic, with more detail than Call of Duty; this is probably the most pleasing aspect of the experience. The weapons art and sound effects are great too, sometimes better than Call of Duty. The squad-based strategy idea is great theoretically, but you'll quickly find that your squad members don't necessarily follow orders very well and get themselves killed in spite of your best efforts to order them into defendable cover. In order to succeed most times I had to put my men in heavy cover and use the tank to take out the German positions. Having a teeny tiny Sherman tank as a squad mate is interesting at first, and certainly useful considering how ineffective your squad's small arms fire is. The limp-wristed Sgt Risner, the tank commander, is hilarious. You can jump up on Risner's tank (no comments please) and become Audie Murphy on the turret mounted machine gun, but for no particular reason the game jumps into 3rd person POV when you do this, making what might have been a great feature annoying and clumsy. Suddenly seeing yourself from above is anything but "authentic" and I found it foreboding.



The main reason not to buy this game however is the "authentic" treatment of aiming weapons. Any soldier whose ability to aim a rifle is as poor as Matt Baker's would never be given sergeant's stripes and in fact would be dead long before he could sew them on. I longed for the possibility of simply setting the M1's barrel on a wall or straw bale in order to get a steady shot just once. The first time you unexpectedly encounter an enemy soldier a few yards away and empty a 20 round clip of .45 Thompson bullets at him with no effect at all, you'll see what I mean. The developers can call this realism if they want, but I quickly saw it as a gimmick that makes the game all but unplayable. They clearly want to make it difficult for the first person character to do all the mission work on his own, making it necessary to rely on the squad to achieve mission goals. It is arguable that this is an admirable motive on several levels, but in my mind it undermines the game's realism rather than enhances it. The other reason not to buy BIA is that the game never really generates the response one gets at least some of the time in Call of Duty-that the situations you find yourself in are serious and scary (recall seeing planes full of American paratroopers being shot down and later coming up on that first German antiaircraft gun as it blasts away at the sky) and the guys who did this for real are worthy of our unending respect.