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Game review: ‘Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway’

Of all the complex war machines featured in today’s high-tech video games — from jet fighters to nuclear submarines — the worst depicted has always been the infantry squad. You, the human player, can raze city blocks and liquidate endless legions of bad guys, but your computer-controlled soldiers are typically good only for shouting canned gems such as, “Reloading!” or “We’re gettin’ murdered out here, Sarge!”

The long-awaited first-person shooter “Brothers In Arms: Hell’s Highway” was billed as an antidote to this problem, with computer-controlled soldiers meant to be more lethal and easier to control than those of earlier games, but it doesn’t quite measure up.

According to early reports, one of “Bro’s” goals was to make it possible for players to finish the game without firing a shot, if they wanted, because they could control their squad with such finesse that the computer soldiers would do all the fighting. I found that I could fire lots of rounds and pay partial attention to my men, or get killed. Even playing on the easy setting, I couldn’t accomplish any of my objectives with just the squad, but it may well be possible with lots of practice.

I take the programmers of “Hell’s Highway” at their word that the computer-controlled soldiers can fight effectively if they’re guided toward the enemy, but my guys seemed like a standard video game squad — distracting me, getting killed and then somehow reappearing in cinematic cut-scenes for banter or lamentations.

Apart from the novel squad-command concept, “Hell’s Highway” is a workaday World War II shooter. You play as the big-hearted sergeant of a lovable pack of grunts — part of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne, a real unit — tasked during Operation Market Garden to brush aside the “old men and Hitler youth” whom Allied commanders believed were guarding Holland. Of course British Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery didn’t count on the SS Panzer divisions that happened to be cooling out in Holland when the Allies came through.

“Hell’s Highway” is a concept too far — it asks players to do too much, between normal video game jobs of moving and shooting and also commanding your squad. Some things that should be basic aren’t: The screen turns red when you’re taking fire, but your controller doesn’t vibrate if you get hit, making it tricky to determine whether the incoming rounds are striking you or they’re just close. When you’re in the command mode, figuring out where to send your men to outflank the Germans, it’s too easy to scatter them pell-mell across the map because you think you’re aiming and firing your weapon.

A word about the weapons: Historical appropriateness aside, I yearned to trade my issued M1 Garand — with its tiny magazine and poky rate of fire — for the smooth, modern weapons of “Call of Duty 4.”

“Hell’s Highway” pours on the “Band of Brothers” sap really thick, complete with choruses, soaring orchestral crescendos and a shocking amount of gore. If you set off an explosion close enough to bad guys, for example, the chunky marinara treatment is excessive.

The designers of “Hell’s Highway” deserve credit for taking on a tough challenge: how to make supporting characters lethal enough to be useful, but not so competent they make the game boring for its human player. However, they lose points for the game’s multiplayer mode, which, when I tested it, was embarrassing: tiny maps in this era of huge ones; buggy graphics in this era of visual richness; and an inexplicable capture-the-flag game as the main multiplayer mode, rather than the traditional death-match mode for which I was hoping.

At least in the online mode, everyone on the battlefield was a human player, of whom nobody was shouting “Incoming!” or “Take this, Jerry!”

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Brothers In Arms: Hell’s Highway.

Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Windows PC

Rated M for “Mature”

$59.99

http://www.brothersinarmsgame.com

Buy? Rent? Skip? Our verdict: Skip