Spontaneous Sunday: Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30

Welcome to another Spontaneous Sunday! This one is a bit late as it was my birthday on Monday so I've had a busy weekend. This week I played Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30 (2005, Gearbox Software, Ubisoft, Playstation 2). I bought it from a market stall for £2 last week.

"Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Gearbox Software and published by Ubisoft for Xbox, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2 and OS X. It is the first game in the Brothers in Arms series. The game takes place during World War II and focuses on tactics."

- Wikipedia on Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30

What do I expect from the game?

Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30 is a WW2 first-person shooter from 2005, which is arguably the "golden era" of WW2 shooters, which is to say that they were very common and popular and generally performed well commercially. I played quite a few games of this genre, but I never owned a Brothers In Arms game. I expect Road To Hill 30 to share many similarities with other similar games in terms of gameplay, style/aesthetic, narrative and level design. I expect linear, objective-based levels, 

Road To Hill 30 promises a "digitally accurate reproduction of Normandy 1944", which interests me as I am into WW2 history. So I expect convincing environments, weapons and levels. With it being an old game, I expect it to have some issues such as dated graphics and unrefined controls.

First Impressions - What do I think of the game in its first few minutes?

I launched the game and was met with the title screen as seen above. The front end is pretty simple, with a 3D landscape as its background and quite minimalistic appearance, with some subtle, barely audible music. Its not a particularly exciting greeting. The game looks pretty retro right from the off. Selected menu options have a red line underneath them which is stylistically reminiscent of the film The Thin Red Line - this was the first of many examples of Road To Hill 30 being inspired by war films.

I started the first mission, which takes place 8 days after D-Day and sees the main character's unit on the losing side of a fire-fight before being hit by a tank and fading to black. The game then goes back to June 6th. So the end of the game is seen at the start, which is another feature borrowed from films and TV. Cutscenes and level intros are accompanied by narration from the player character. The narration is always serious and bleak and this is the tone that game is trying to set for itself, rather than a bravado-filled, patriotic affair.

Title card for the intro mission - looks very film-y!

Shot from the prelude mission.

Following the intro segment, credits play over a cutscene of photographs, postcards and documents in another example of film-like feature. The next mission begins with the night-time Allied airdrops into Normandy in the early hours of D-Day, before the beach landings. Your plane is shot down forcing your character to drop early. It's a fairly exciting and convincing series of events. You find yourself in an unknown area, unarmed and needing to meet up with the rest of your squad. Once this is achieved, the player gets a pistol and is shown the basics of shooting.

Shot of the opening credits.

The mission then sees you fight some enemies, meet up with more squad members, and destroying some enemy artillery pieces. It's a simple intro that ticks all the boxes in terms of introducing you to basic movement and combat, but it can't be said to be terribly exciting as far as first levels go and theres nothing much that sets it apart from other WW2 games. The UI is simple and familiar-looking. One nice feature of the UI is that it gives an arrow on the compass for the objective, and as you get closer to it, a yellow outline spreads around the compass from the arrow and meets itself when you reach the objective.

Situational Awareness view.

The first mission also introduces the "Situational Awareness" mechanic, which pauses gameplay and takes the camera into a top-down perspective that allows you to survey the battlefield and see the locations of enemies, objectives and allies. This is an interesting and refreshing mechanic that I've not seen before and adds a tactical element to the game. I played a few more levels that involved such things as destroying enemy mortar teams, clearing roads and defending against counter-attacks.

What do I like about the game? What does it do well?

Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30 has some nice features that help it to stand out. The game's narrative tone and influence from war films makes it feel mature and serious, though it sometimes lays it on a bit thick.

Road To Hill 30's biggest strength is in its unique mechanics. The game has mechanics that offer and encourage tactical approaches to missions, such as Situation Awareness, commanding soldiers and suppressing enemies. The Situational Awareness mechanic allows you to view the area from a top-down perspective and plan out your moves. You are also able to command friendly soldiers, and this mechanic is really useful and intuitive. You can command soldiers to move to locations, take cover, fire on specific enemies, follow you and charge enemies. This feature plays a big role in most missions and really shapes the way that the game plays. It also adds a level of realism to the combat.

The tutorial for the squad control system.

Another strong mechanic is the suppression mechanic, which involves shooting at enemies in cover to suppress them and stop them from firing on you so you and your squad can advance. It's another mechanic that adds a tactical element and realism to the combat, though it often results in combat degenerating to both sides taking pot shots which can get boring. Nevertheless, these mechanics help to set the game apart from its contemporaries and makes for some interesting tactical gameplay. The level design is clearly well considered to provide an environment where these mechanics can shine, with multiple routes and flanking opportunities.

The game's 3D models, particularly the weapons and vehicles, are quite well done considering the game's age. As a 3D modeller myself and a fan of the low-poly art style seen in PS2-era games, I found myself examining many of the 3D models.

Finally, another thing that I liked about the game was the box art and the design of the packaging and manual. With the ever-increasing popularity of purely digital games and in-game manuals, I think that physical game manuals and box contents are becoming a lost art form! The game comes with a manual that is modelled after a WW2 military file, with images of characters, descriptions of weapons etc. You also get a poster than on one side has a map of Normandy and timeline of events and on the other side, a comic-style image showing the process of flanking an enemy.

What don't I like about the game?

Though the game offers some unique and fairly innovative mechanics, it has a number of issues and shows its age in some key ways. Firstly, theres the controls, which feel very dated and often don't make much sense and are clearly from a time before FPS controls became the refined, streamlined layouts seen in games today. For example, shooting is mapped to R1, and aiming is mapped to R3. Movement is also clunky and awkward. Aiming is hard as the movement of the weapon has only one speed so its difficult to make slight adjustments to your aim - which is bad because a lot of the combat involves trying to hit enemies who are mostly obscured by cover.

The game's mission types and objectives aren't very exciting or innovative. The levels are based on real events, which is commendable, but I feel like the level designers could have done more with the scenarios to make each level more exciting. Also, there are no health pickups and no health regeneration in the game, so you basically have to complete each mission on one health bar, though if you die enough times, you do get the option to respawn with replenished health, but this doesn't make up for the lack of health regen.

Your fellow soldiers, the use of which is often pivotal to success in a level, are very easily killed and sometimes take dangerous routes which end up getting them killed. They can't be revived, meaning that once they're down, you have to complete the level without them. This makes the levels very difficult because they are designed to be completed with the help of AI allies! Also, because of the need to suppress enemy positions and move up carefully, it can be tedious to advance through levels if you keep getting pinned down. This is pretty realistic, but doesn't always make for exciting gameplay.

Finally, theres a few technical issues. In areas with a lot of content or long sight-lines, there can be some rather noticeable drops in frame-rate. The game came out towards the end of the Playstation 2's life cycle, so its possible that the art assets and graphics pushed the system to its limit, causing the frame-rate issues. The fire particle effect in the game is noticeably low-quality, with too few key frames for it to appear realistic and it really sticks out. The game's flowing water also looks low quality. The audio is also not great, with the weapon sounds lacking punch and sounding weak. The game doesn't have much in the way of music either.

Final Thoughts

I have mixed feelings about Road To Hill 30. While it has some really strong mechanics that I'm surprised weren't borrowed by other FPS games, the gameplay is generally a bit slow and at times tedious and awkward. There's also the issues that came with it being an old game such as the dated  controls, clunky gameplay and aiming, and the poor audio and particle effects which let it down, possibly to the point of out-weighing the game's positive points.

With all that said, the game was well received by both critics and players when it released in 2005, so my negative opinions are likely due to being used to the refined modern FPS games. FPS games have definitely come a long way since Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30. I'm not sure if I would play it again, but I would be interested in playing some later games in the series to see how it progressed and whether it managed to keep up with times and iron out its issues.