Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 (PS2)
Around the time of release of Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, there was a glut of World War II shooters on the market, leading to people being hungry for some changes to the increasingly familiar design that could reinvigorate the stagnating genre. Most of these games were, in essence, the tale of one soldier who tears through the enemy all on their own, but while this makes for enjoyable gameplay, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 decided to take a more realistic approach, the entire squad being focused on as part of a firefight rather than just one member. While certainly a fresh direction for the WW2 shooter, it did come with a price.
The player is still control of a single individual in this title, albeit it’s the squad’s leader Sergeant Baker. Baker is able to give orders to his men, but he’ll also be out on the battlefield himself, weapon in hand, ready to fight back the Germans on D-Day. However, to deemphasize the one-man army nature of its contemporaries, the game has Sergeant Baker take a few hits to his effectiveness. Some of these are understandable, like the fact that if you’re in the open you can be easily taken down by enemy fire, and the only way to recover from health is to finish a mission or fail at it so many times the game extends you a pity heal option. However, the bigger penalty placed on Baker is his personal accuracy. Presented through first person, you can raise your gun to aim at an opponent, but the bullets have a tendency to not go exactly where you’re pointing. This is again trying to discourage you from trying to handle everything yourself, your shots not being reliable enough on their own to effectively take down a group of enemy soldiers, but we’ll get to why it’s an issue when we look at squad effectiveness. For now, it’s important to note that it does well enough on enemies out in the open or when they’re close enough, so there’s a reasonable range where your shots will work, and weapons like sniper rifles are more reliable due to their intended use. You’ll mostly stick to machine guns for typical firefights and grenades to force enemies out of cover, but most of the game is focused on its idea of making you work as part of a squad rather than giving too much power to Baker.
The problem is, the squad commanding isn’t as reliable as one might hope. Your commands are limited to only a few options to start with, the player able to order their fellow soldiers to follow them, move to an area, and lay down suppressing fire on enemies or charge them. Many of the firefights in the game are designed around the idea that you will command your troops to hide behind cover and lay down some cover fire on a far off enemy, a circle appearing above the enemy’s head to tell you if they’re properly suppressed. Suppressed enemies are less accurate and won’t try to fire as often, but to take them down often involves flanking them from the side either on your own or with a second group of troops. This is pretty much the only tactic really possible, there’s not enough complexity for things like pincer movements or ambushing from the rear save if the paths set up specifically for flanking purposes go that far back, so this element of strategy is really just the typical approach rather than something really interesting from a tactical standpoint. You can later get some armored vehicles to back you up to shake things up, able to send in tanks a bit more aggressively to flush out enemies or distract them, but flanking is the name of the game most of the time.
Still, flanking would provide a decent enough set up for the firefights, requiring more than just pointing and shooting, but your squadmates aren’t always too intelligent. Most of the time you can expect them to do what they’re told, but it’s not totally uncommon to have them fail to follow orders or do something that puts themselves at risk. It’s understandable if the troops wouldn’t follow an order if you’re ordering them into something suicidally dangerous, but there are times where they will just refuse to advance from one safe point to another, likely because their AI pathing fails to understand how to navigate the walls and cover properly between the points. This takes some doing to correct, but it’s not as bad as when a soldier completely fails to move into cover properly. You can order your men to specifically hide behind barriers during a firefight, but some men decide that rather than safely hunkering behind a wall, they’d rather stand right next to it with their body fully exposed for the enemy to fire at. Men might not immediately move where you tell them if they’re under fire either, waiting for a lull in the action, but if this man has placed himself out for the world to see, then he’s going to be even harder to convince to move to a safer spot. You only have a finite amount of men per mission, and while any that die during the chapter will revive in time for the next one, there’s no way to bring them back during play unless you restart the entire mission. Even the pity heal for failing too much will only rejuvenate whoever you had with you at the most recent checkpoint.
That issue with troop death is why it can be obnoxious that your aim isn’t up to snuff. Your troops can get themselves killed through no fault of your own and then you are basically made to be the one man army unless you want to restart the whole chapter. Some chapters go longer than others or have different focuses, and there are even ones where you are essentially running solo, but despite mixing up its environment and objective design between chapters to keep it from being just sequences of firefights, some clearly want your squad present. Multiple enemy encampments might be firing at you at once, so if things just so happen to swing the wrong way for you, then it’s either restart time or trying to overcome quite an imbalanced battle. It is reasonable that you should feel less capable without your buddies to back you up, but Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is designed for you to rely on them too much when they aren’t very reliable themselves.
The emphasis on teamwork is presented through the story as well, but it feels like it wanted to show tight camaraderie between the troops but didn’t want to spend too much time working on it. You can see at times some light-hearted teasing, idle chat, and reminiscing between the members of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment, but most of these supposed moments of bonding are instead recounted by Baker over a black screen between chapters. Getting attached to characters through exposition rather than interaction isn’t quite as effective, and Baker even plays the “this is my new family” card a bit too early, the player not really getting to know the group well enough before they’re suddenly supposedly extremely close. The game also starts, oddly enough, with a scene of the group at Hill 30, spoiling the fates of certain characters, and while the game is based on a true story that was likely to take some unfortunate turns for certain members of the group, knowing the ultimate outcome of some story branches so early doesn’t seem to add much. There’s still some room in the story for some interesting characters, such as Leggett who suffers not just from survivor’s guilt, but gets blamed for the deaths of others by his own fellow troops. Still, the odd way of building up this group’s supposed close-knit friendships and the finnicky order system might not endear you to your brothers in arms as much as the game sets out to.
THE VERDICT: Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 wanted to emphasize that war is a team effort through its mechanics and story, but it comes up short in both regards. The AI of your teammates can be annoying to deal with as they sometimes refuse to listen or put themselves in danger inexplicably, and the story is mostly one man telling you how tight-knit the regiment is with only a few moments showing real interaction between the troops. To try and encourage use of your squads, your own shooting isn’t too effective, but your squad tactics are pretty much limited to flanking foes in areas designed only for that one tactic. Things like the suppression system are interesting additions to combat though, and while the majority of the experience isn’t too bumpy, the niggling nuisances will rise up at inopportune times, dragging down a game that did try to break the World War II shooter mold but didn’t have the technical expertise to back up its new elements.
And so, I give Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 for PlayStation 2…
A BAD rating. Funnily enough, despite the penalties to your accuracy and emphasis on using your fellow soldiers for support, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 can settle into feeling like its contemporaries at times. Your men mostly exist for suppressing fire as you rush in, maybe with a little back up, to gun guys down from the side. Had this worked as intended, it still wouldn’t be too interesting since the game’s illusion of tactical play is broken by the rigid area designs that mix up gameplay goals but not gameplay approaches. The technical issues just push it down from being tolerable to being irritating, the player having to work with limited systems to overcome challenges made more difficult by hiccups in the game design. When your men and you work together well it can feel satisfying, but it’s often shallow and imprecise, so the main draw of the game ends up the main flaw as well. It is the first of many Brothers in Arms games though, so it is possible some issues are smoothed over eventually and the tactics get fleshed out later, but technical limitations and inexperience likely lead to the system’s half-baked implementation here.
Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 wants you to feel like part of an effective team, but in the end, it may make you resent your fellow soldiers for their occasionally belligerent AI. At least when you charge in as a single soldier in other World War II shooters you can blame yourself for failure, but here, the game likes to leave you high and dry with the illusion that it was somehow tactical failure that did you in rather than a system that isn’t quite solid enough to support the kind of game you’re playing.