It's Grim is War.
By Koworld
Please note: This review refers to the original Brothers in Arms game, not the one that's just been released. We will get round to reviewing that one probably in 2007. We at Rodent like to make the very best use of the instantaneous medium that is the intermaweb.
I've been struggling for months to write a review of Brothers in Arms because it's just so damn real - it fits horribly well with the history programmes on the Discovery Channel. Many other reviewers have branded it as ‘repetitive’ and absolutely it is. And it's random and cruel too. It hammers home the simple reality that to survive an engagement is utterly about nothing but luck. All the training is an illusion - a way in which to bolster the grunt's belief in his own superiority. There is no attempt here to glamorise or otherwise ameliorate the hideous experience of shooting people and of being shot at.
Let’s tackle that issue of variety first: broadly, Brothers in Arms is a squad-based tactical shooter in which the only variety is that sometimes you get a tank as an additional squad member. The story follows the slog from Normandy to a little bit of security at Hill 30, you run around fields, through small towns, etc and each time you will have a selection of objectives to sort out: blow-up this, dislodge that, take the other. To do so generally involves avoiding a selection of MG42 machine gun nests, making sensible use of suppressing fire and flanking the enemy’s position. And that really is it.
Lethal.
If the game had been delivered at Medal of Honour quality then it would have seen five minutes play and then the inside of it’s slipcase for ever. But, and here’s where developer Gearbox has got it so right: this game feels like a simulation more than any other WWII game I’ve ever played. You feel like a random grunt, a number, and you so quickly lose yourself in the game’s unique and disturbing atmosphere. Firstly, the terrain is right: it feels like sleepy rural France with death in, and it sounds like war: not the great rumbling score and rat-a-tat of Hollywood. Sound in BiA is about detail: birds singing, bullet-casings pinging, the crack-chamber-crack-chamber rhythm of a rifle being used, and the very real use of language by your buddies and by the enemy. There is bitterness and desperation and every sentence. The world created in BiA is trudging and authentic. Even though it is repetitive, it’s still a game I enjoyed playing enormously.
Realism is the key to this game: as you complete missions it rewards you with the research that went into creating the engagement you just participated in. You soon realise that all the irritating bits are actually just 'what happened' but there is one story that I simply haven't been able to shake since playing it: at one point you run through a large farmhouse doing the usual - lobbing grenades and using your pretend buddies as human shields, and then you run into what turns out to be a dining room, in it are seven Germans eating and of course you gun them all down in a simple left-right-left spray of submachine-gun fire. As you run past the corpses you're thinking 'lazy design that, I mean, we've been lobbing fucking grenades and raising the noise of hell out here but the AI can't even work out that means they're being attacked. I mean Christ not one of them even fired a shot.'
And then you read an unlocked photocopy of a real engagement report from 1944 in which an American officer describes having been attacking a farmhouse for some fifteen minutes, killing a number of enemy positioned in the grounds before advancing through the house using grenades and machine gun fire, and then, utterly chillingly he describes how his unit-lead kicked-open a door and found on the other side seven Germans, jackets off, having their lunch and completely ignoring the sounds of battle outside. This description is then followed by a simple reference to his unit lead having then machine-gunned the seven people.
And I read that, and thought back to having played the same bit in the game and it felt for a split-second like I'd been allowed space in somebody else's repeat nightmare. Very disturbing, and possibly quite important.
October 2005
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