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Ambitious but ultimately weak WWII shooter

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: July 06, 2005
Author: Amazon User

It's funny how game magazines and critics are besides themselves with joy when reviewing this game, because I was so incredibly disappointed with the execution that I sold it back within a couple of weeks. The idea is simple: take the intensely realistic, scripted action of "Call of Duty", throw in some squad based action ("Full Spectrum Soldier"; "Republic Commando"), add some Spielberg-esque attempts at narration and drama, and voila, the most over-hyped and underwhelming WWII action/shooter in history!

The GOOD: Nice Graphics (though not up to "Far Cry", "Doom 3" or "Half-Life 2" standards or even close); the game does present some tense, gritty and realistic moments; the voice acting can be pretty good (though it can also be cheesy and bad).

The BAD: Lather, rinse repeat. Here is the game in a nutshell: you are walking around with your squad. You spot a german machine gun nest. You order your buddies to lay suppressing fire on them. You walk around the convenient hedge/building/car to surprise the idiotic enemy and you try to pump them full of lead. The game is fun for the first few missions because its strategic element is new, but once you realize that it's pretty much all the game has to offer... Well, let's just say I went back to playing HL2.

The aiming is another casualty of the "realism". In an attempt to make you feel like you were really in the French countryside hunting Nazis, your weapon will bob and weave (presumably to simulate "real" aiming), you have no crosshairs (though you can insert them through the options menu) and your rate of fire is slow. There seems to be two camps when it comes to this game: those who love its "realism" and accuse the haters of simply liking unrealistic shooters, and those who can see through the hype and cheesy gimmicks (and that's what this game's realism is, a gimmick) and see the flaws and tedium of this game.

The UGLY: For all its realistic tendencies, this game magically revives your squad mate after every gunfight. How convenient! The enemy AI is mentally retarded (gee, a flanking maneuver! Never would have expected that!) and the main narrator sounds like an idiot.

BOTTOM LINE: I'm not against realism, but this is still a game, and there are certain conventions that exist because they make games more enjoyable. Sometimes games try to do away with those conventions (save anywhere, good mouse-look aiming, etc) and they usually fail, because at the end of the day... we are still playing in front of a monitor with a mouse and keyboard. The idea isn't bad, but the repetitive nature of the gameplay really, really got to me.

Gearbox Does It Again

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 11
Date: April 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The flaws in this game can be broken down into a number of areas. And sadly, the biggest flaw is with the very concept of the game itself: the idea of 'the most realistic combat experience of all time'.

First, as many have noted, it is next to impossible to hit your target. The major cause of this is the irritating and pointless gun waver, which happens in roughly the same amount regardless of your stance (crouch or standing, as you cannot go prone). This is a new feature in shooters that I frankly just don't understand. Why on earth would you want to pay money to have a program forcibly mess up your aim? One can make all the arguments about realism they want, but in reality lots of things are possible to stabilize your weapon - resting against a wall, leaning on a surface, lying on the ground, etc. How can anyone crow about realism when all your getting are the real hindrances, and none of the real possibilities to counter those problems?

Shooting is also hampered by the extremely overdone "iron sight" mode, which obscures about 60% of the screen. More reality? Perhaps if you're a cyclops. The final nail in the coffin for shooting is the seemingly random hit detection. It's common to be standing in a room ten feet from the enemy and unloading on him with your weapon and hitting nothing. Cover only exacerbates the problem. Seriously, if a person's head is sticking out of cover you should be able to hit him.

All of these problems combine to make the shooting aspect of the game absolutely miserable. Since this is a shooter, that's not the best start.

The remaining elements of the game don't fare much better. AI is wonky - if it's not executing a direct, scripted action they're about as dumb as posts. In one map I stood in the open in front of a German with an MG42 and he just stared at me. I guess that's only fair, because even though he was in the open I was completely unable to hit him. A lot was made about the ability to order your squads to perform "real military maneuvers", but in actuality there is just one such maneuver: suppress and flank. Over and over and over. And it's not even an open environment. You just have to order your men to suppress one part of the corridor, go to the one place you can flank the enemy, and shoot them from that other part of the corridor. Get comfortable, it will take a while - and you'll be doing the exact same move for the entire game.

The presentation doesn't help matters. The graphics look really outdated. The facial animations are very limited (although the eyes do look nice), and lipsynching is comically bad. The strict linearity of the game is enforced by hedgerows that are apparently made of concrete - the entire world feels stiff and unnatural.

Then we have the story. There really is no other word for it than hackneyed. Some reviewers have said that this is an "adult" view of a war video game. Strange how people equate "adult" with "long-winded", because that's what this game is. Trite, long-winded, hackneyed, and excruciatingly lame. It's like the videogame version of Trent Malick's pompous "Thin Red Line". Soldiers reciting poetry, speaking in grave tones about sophomoric things. I half expected some blond-haired moppet to pop out and ask innocently, "Daddy, what's a war?". It's seriously that bad.

The matter isn't helped by the fact that if you don't wait just long enough before quitting for the autosave, you'll be forced to listen to some of the opening speeches over and over. If I hear that stupid story about the guy who slices his hard-boiled eggs again, I swear I'll kick a puppy. These embarassing speeches fail to lend the game its desired gravitas, and the resulting muddled presentation isn't helped by the addition of several cheesy jokes that were apparently written by a sixth grader ("'Say hello to them infantry style'? You mean ... kill them?").

Overall, there's not a lot to recommend this game. If you're still interested in seeing it I strongly recommend playing a demo before shelling out the cash.

Don't waste your cash

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 10
Date: October 27, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I've very disappointed with the game since I installed it yesterday. It looks nice but the FPS portion is VERY poorly done. You can sneak up behind an enemy, be 5 feet away, and still bloody well miss with your M1! I don't think so. Aiming down the sights is even worse, the weapon will bounce all over the place even at rest and crouching. Like a previous gentleman, I own an M1 and M1 carbine. They are VERY accurate. The weapons in this game are poory modeling and it makes for a very frustrating experience. The one good aspect of the game is the squad interaction. The mouse point and click interface is much better than MOH: Pacific Assault's limited instructions. I've also run into a few game glitches even with the latest patches. Troops have disappeared from the play area even though the pictures are there and you can hear them acknowledge commands. Again, frustrating. I doubt I will even finish it now that I am past D-Day. Overall, don't waste your money and wait until COD2 comes out.

Stick With Call of Duty

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 9 / 13
Date: July 10, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I deleted this game off my hard drive after 3 days. It just could not match Call of Duty. Stupid storylines, canned dialogue, nonresponsive squad members and hideously inaccurate M1 Garands just made this game a real mess, not to mention a pain in the keester to play. The game made a noble attempt to simulate squad-based WWII infantry combat and failed. To add insult to injury, the game "entices" you to win your missions on higher difficulty levels so you can access "secret" information about the "real" WWII. I thought: "Ah, this could be interesting,' so I doubled my kraut-killing efforts and prevailed. But having done your duty and gained access to the "secret" files, your reward is to be lectured by a 21-year-old nasally graphics-design nerd about how he went to France and sketched the house that he so accurately rendered in the game... "puhl-leeze!!"
And where was the gore? After reading "War Is Hell" on the front cover, I figured, "Hey! This game might supply the slaughter factor I loved from back in the RTCW days, complete with gut-ruptured bodies, rolling heads, tossed limbs, etc..." But to little avail. The most carnage you see is a German with a leg off and almost no blood. Not too hellish... and certainly not on a Doom 3 scale. Not even close to "Saving Private Ryan."
Oh, and one more thing. The multiplayer on this game is atrociously bad. You can only have four players on line at once and it's just impossible to control your guys as a squad. They wind up getting themselves killed before you can right-click enough to get them out of the way. Call of Duty just blows the doors off this game on this score. I like playing as the Germans, and I was very upset when I gave my voice cue commands and they came out in English with a stupid German accent: "Mein Gott, I am hit." I think this game is "hit," too. Somebody call a medic on this one.

great for me but...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: March 30, 2005
Author: Amazon User

for me this game was great, it had me in its grip for about a week until i beat it on easy and am struggling through the other difficulties. to me this game plays more like a movie or something when you have breaks in between levels and hear your character talk. one thing that was lacking was when a squad member was killed i didnt feel i knew him well enough to care about it. i also wouldnt really consider this game a shooter it is a totally unique game, i would say you have the option to shoot. i have gone through levels without shooting once and having my squads do all the work. this game is much like full spectrum warrior in the tactical sense where you have one squad hold down the enemy and the other team flank them, and you probably wont kill the enemy in a shoot out. i also have never played call of duty and hear that is the best ww2 game from friends so take that into account while reading my review

Mediocre game full of "maze" following

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: March 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

If you like Call of Duty, etc...you'll have no problems here and will be floored by the utter complexity of the combat situations you will be thrust into.

Anyone looking for strategic military simulations like Operation Flashpoint will be very disappointed. Essentially, you have to flank your opponents every dang time. It gets redundant and boring. The reason it is boring is because in doing this you simply tell you guys to provide covering fire while you run around another PATH that ends up behind the enemy. You don't get into the forest etc... you keep looking around until you find the OBVIOUS flank. Its BORING.

Multiplayer is unpolished and boring after a few games.

The previous statment about the problems with hitting targets is unfortunately accurate...its very hard to hit targets from behind rocks. Often, your soldiers will fire at soldiers 2 feet away and never hit it. Its like a scene from Naked Gun. It would be funny if it didn't cost you 50 bucks to see it.

Be Still My Pounding Heart

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: March 23, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Brothers in Arms is truly remarkable on so many levels it's difficult to know where to begin, however I guess I should start by saying that this is an ADULT title and not for the wee ones in your clan. The language is saucy to say the least with the "mother of all swear words, the F-dash-dash-dash word" being sprinkled around in liberal doses, so liberal in fact that in the beginning of the game the language (was to say the least) a trifle off-putting even for a guy who on occasion has been known to throw expletives around like Julia Louis-Dryfus on a bender. That said however, it is war after all and I can't imagine nearly having my head taken off by a German machine gun without some form of colourful metaphor slipping through my clenched teeth. The violence is fairly intense as well, but nothing we haven't seen in games like Call of Duty or Splinter Cell. Those issues taken care of lets get down to the nitty gritty of this outstanding title.

The game play is riveting as you are quickly called upon to lead a fire-team through the Normandy countryside. The action ramps up gradually enough to allow you time to acclimate to your weapons and commands without getting taken down in every open street. Ordering your team to direct fire on specific targets, to re-group or go to a location is fantastically executed; a simple right click of the mouse illuminates an onscreen icon, one for "go to a location" or "concentrate fire". The amazing bit of danger here however is being swallowed up by the fog of war as bullets zip over your head, while you're screaming orders to your comrades, in fact it's easy to get sucked so tightly into the action that you're lost with a deadly case of tunnel vision, and there in lies the vane of gold that runs through Brothers in Arms. Unlike any other combat game ever produced, you start to take it very personal when you've sent your boys on a fools mission just to have them gunned down in the middle of the street, you're in charge and you feel like it and frankly when someone gets killed because you've cracked under the pressure it p#@%es you off in a big way! You're responsible and it's easy to start thinking that maybe it's up to you to win every battle on your own so the kids under your command can go home in one piece, but that doesn't work either, this is a team based experience and you have to act as a tightly knitted team or get wiped out in the process.

On first blush the graphics seemed to stumble a bit but after 30 seconds who's noticing anything but the blazing flash from that MG down the street anyway? Compared to Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (being a 10 graphically) Brothers in Arms offers a solid 8, but the way the levels are designed and the way the action moves, the images sometimes feel too real as German soldiers leap over a split rail fence cast against the horizon, it's a deadly mistake and one you'll take full advantage of but remember not to be caught in the same position yourself or face the dire consequences. Brothers also takes you behind the iron sites of your weapon, no crosshairs here, you stick you're M-1 under your chin and squeeze off a round, several rounds and guess what, sometimes you can't hit the broad side of a barn, that's because it's real, it's intense, war is imperfect and sometimes the guy on the other side of that hedgerow has a better aim than you do and you die.

Sound design is well executed, the snap of rifles cracking in the distance, or down tight alley ways is stunning and ear piercing and although 5.1 surround is stellar, wearing headphones offers a strange claustrophobic effect as you scramble with your rifle, crack-crack-cracking through the morning haze, you can hear your men screaming from somewhere behind you (or in the murky distance) that they don't have a shot or they're wounded, and the German's call out from behind sand bags... Bother in Arms is one wild ride indeed!

Performance is top notch on my system (Compaq Presario 8000T, Pentium 4 - 3.20E GHz processor, XP Home Edition, Radeon 9800, 1 GB DDR / PC3200 Ram, 160GB 7200 rpm Hard Drive) with every thing pushed to the firewall, no lag, no slow down just hours of white-knuckle thrills.

Brothers in Arms might be just a video game, but hopefully it's the closet our kids will ever get to real combat... if only we could fight all our battles from our desktops.

Good attempt, CRAPPY results......Don't buy it!!!!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 17
Date: March 29, 2005
Author: Amazon User

First of all, any review of this game dated before March is a load of lies. LIES!!!! This game was not available until 3/2005! Not August 2004!!! How honest can a reviewer of this product be if the game was not available at the time the review was written? Go home losers! Get a life!

Let me cut to the quick -
Brothers in Arms tries to be Call Of Duty with squad based action. IT FAILS MISERABLY!!!!!!

This game tries to offer a really solid, SQUAD based game. No more typical First Person shooter. In other words, you don't go running full speed shooting everything in site! And your squad mates actually do help you defeat the enemy.

SADLY, this sounds better than it actually is.

Game graphics -
This game runs on the Unreal Engine so I expected top of the line graphics. You get far less than that! Even the soldiers have NO facial expressions. Their lips move but the face does not change or offer any emotion or expression. Stick lips on a 2"x6" pine plank and you will get the same experience!!!

Vocals/Dialog -
OHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhh soooo painful! Cliche' after cliche', tons of curse words thrown in as a desperate attempt to give you the "grit" of war. Bad monologues that run on forever, bad cutscenes, nothing interesting at all.

Weapons -
Nice selection...but highly inaccurate!!! To get any accurate shooting done, you MUST aim down the barrel. With all the fast action going on, you have no time to aim and line up a shot. If you shoot with out aiming, you better be 2 feet away from the guy...and even then they will kill you quick!!!
You will not get the chance to use many of the weapons either...unless you hunt on the ground for the dead soldiers dropped weapons.

Gameplay -
Squad based activity is decent but repetitive. The missions are almost pointless and definitely are redundant! It winds up turning into the same thing everytime. Get ready, start the mission, Germans appear, order your squad to provide cover fire while you flank them and kill them. Wash, rinse and repeat....until the game is finally done!

Game Length -
Short and not creative. I finished this game on the Difficult setting in 7 hours. I finished it on the hardest setting in 10 hours. Too short and the gameplay is so clumsy at times that you just don't want to play it again. Not rewarding at all.

They should rename it "Brothers in Hype".

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 12 / 23
Date: March 19, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I cannot believe how much this game was hyped! It sure paid off, the hype machine keeps rolling with the fanboys on this one. I found Brothers in Arms-PC VERY poor...

They should rename Brothers in Arms to "Brothers in Hype", because thats all this game has, hype, and totally lacks substance and polish. Well its definately a straight console port (A big no-no for PCs). Heres my thoughts so far on Brothers in Arms.

1) The text on the menus is MASSIVE, cartoony, probably because it wasn't converted when ported from console.
2) The controls are very "Console Like".
3) No keys are re-mappable to extra mouse buttons! (ACK)
4) Music is overdone, and voice acting is somewhat average.
5) Overhead RTS mode is quite poorly implemented.
6) Graphics are substandard, 8-bit textures, no shaders, very very dated and blocky.
7) No EAX support that I can find.
8.) Big red dots overtop of enemy destroys immersion.
9) Game is seriously on rails, it even stops you from walking at random times, so it can turn on story elements. (lame)
10) AI is extremely questionable, and sometimes, downright lame.

It might have some good points, but the flaws are so glarring I don't even think I can start to overlook them. This one might have been good on the console, but for a PC its just average - at best. But the hype machine is rolling strong on this one.

I do not recommend this title. Save your money.

Very well done

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: March 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This was a very solid effort and a good gaming experience. Although a FPS, it makes a pretty simple set of command tools available to maneuver fire teams from point to point, suppress and maneuver on the enemy. A couple of times if you get through a level but lose most of your squad then you will have difficulty standing of a counterattack, for example, by yourself.

Most of the game play in and of itself has been covered before. It is probably the best FPS out there in the WWII genre, requires more thought/tactics then the others, but it has the limits of the genre.

Where the game breaks really new ground is in some of the extras. It makes a good effort to portray the characters as individuals, with some success. The battle scenes are real battlefields and some of the incidents are scripted to follow the actual battle (Cole's Charge, the battle of Harrison Summers at WXYZ)There are some cut screens that show then/now/computer imagery to illustrate this level of detail; the computer programmers actually traveled to Normandy and mapped out their screens that way. It is a new twist. Lastly, there are little lessons on tactics, battles, and weapons that appear (more or less depending on your degree of difficulty played)after scenarios that are nice touches; you could replay a game at a higher level to see an extra lesson, if you like. There is, as far as I can tell, one "real" character in LTC Robert Cole, and you fight a scenario as a soldier in the bayonet charge he led and won the Medal of Honor for.

If that sort of realism is interesting you, then this is the only game in town. If you just want to shoot orcs and pixels then this may not be your cup of tea.

A note on weapons. As best I can tell, submachine guns at very close range and sniper rifles reliably "kill" the enemy when they hit. Rifles, even with perfect sight picture, tend to suppress the enemy and allow you to close and flank a position. That takes some getting used to. It is more realistic, and I'd say better, but it is different. You cant just snipe the Germans with your M1 and blast your way through, as you couldnt in real life.

A new twist, a good, generally bugless effort, and a fun game. Highly recommend.

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