Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway

The Good
I have played the previous two brother in arms but did not nearly enjoy them as I did with this game. In-fact this game encouraged me to go back and actually completed the other two. Normally I do not enjoy the unreal engine with this type of game, but I was really surprised.

Once again you get to lead two squads of paratroopers against enemy concentrations, ensuring you use special techniques to defeat the enemy, i.e. fix the enemy (cover fire) flank the enemy (with light units) and fire (wipe them out). In the previous games, cover was always an issue, you could hide behind something and still get nailed by rounds, because your crouch wasn't low enough. In this game it uses the cover and fire system, whereby your character is safe if in cover mode and then can fire above cover, around cover and blind fire at the enemy (This is also used successfully in the Rainbow six vegans series)

This makes the game more realistic and gives the player time to think in a combat situation, how to get the upper hand. You have a tactical overview which allows you to plan set moves which can be helpful.

The storyline continues from where it left off, this in itself encourages you continue to see how you and your buddies pull through.

The Bad
I am sitting here trying to figure out what I did not enjoy and there are not many things. Occasionally triggers are not triggered and you have to restart a mission, although this may have been dealt with in patches.

I played this game through twice within a month on difficult settings so something in this game must have pulled me back.

The Bottom Line
This is a very realistic and immersive game and I really enjoyed it, in fact I hope they bring out another one with similar game-play. I feel that it is sadly an underrated franchise and was surprised to see how quickly its price dropped within a year of release.

The Good
The game takes place in the Second World War and it focuses on Market Garden. I haven't seen a game take place in the Kingdom of the Netherlands before (aside from a few missions in Medal of Honor: Front line) and I just love it. It may sound a little unfair to praise the game just because it takes place in my country, but most games don't even acknowledge our existence, so I am going to give points for it anyway.

The action is part strategy and part action, switching between these two is fast and it adds more depth to the cover-based fighting.

The soldiers under your command and the people you meet (like the Dutch resistance, once again thanks for acknowledging us) managed to endear themselves to me and that is useful because I think everybody agrees that if you are going to give orders to soldiers, you must at least care about them. A job well done.

The difficulty curve is done very well done, you will face off against soldiers on foot early on in the game, but then machine guns and mortals will start showing up and nearing the end of the game you'll run into tanks quite a lot and sometimes two or three at a time.

The Bad
There are quite a lot of glitches and that can prove to be very annoying. Quite often I would lose entire squads because they decided to hide at the wrong side of a wall or stop moving while we were dodging machine gun fire.

The story is a bit silly and really requires you to have played the earlier games in this series. It is something about a cursed handgun and traumatic experiences, while it is better than most other stories in shooter games, it is still very annoying to watch the same flashback five times and still not know what happened.

The Bottom Line
If you are like me and you think shooters have too less strategy and strategy games have too less action then this game is the perfect solution for your problem. The game is not meant for everybody though and most people are sick of the Second World War by now, so this game is a little late. If you can still bring up the interest for another war game though, this one is totally worth checking out,