From the day I saw a recording of the E3 demo of Brothers in Arm here at work, I was excited to get my hands on it. It looked great. The gameplay concepts were solid. But would it play well?

The Game is the thing…
The second word in video games is game! Personally, I think it should be the other way around: game videos. Graphics are important, but without a good solid gameplay mechanic, graphics mean squat. Brothers in Arms takes one simple concept, "fix & flank", and turns it into one heck of a tactical shooter.

The game plays like a typical first person shooter. You move around in a 3D world created to look and feel like France during World War II. You shoot at bad guys (in this case German troops - no offense to my fellow humans in Germany) and try to stay alive. Simple right? Enter the tactical part of Brothers in Arms and the core gameplay mechanic: fix & flank. While you could feasibly run around and shoot everyone yourself (with great difficulty), the best way to deal with the enemy is using fix & flank. Most enemy troops are well concealed behind cover. Getting to that cover without being killed or losing your men is very hard unless you use your noggin. The first step is to order your fire team to suppress the group of targets you want to kill. They will begin firing on the enemy units from behind cover with the sole purpose of pinning them down behind their own cover. Once this is achieved, you may then order your assault team to take the enemy out without worrying about being fired upon. There's nothing more satisfying during this game than watching your men execute a well planned fix & flank maneuver, decimating the enemy.

While the missions change and the locations change, the core gameplay mechanic is always there. Fix the enemy then flank him. In some missions you have a tank along with the fire & assault teams. But the selection of the tank and its use are consistent with and revolve around that same mechanic. The challenges and situations vary enough to make the player feel like he isn't playing the same level over and over.

Learning the game is easy. Gearbox set it up so that the first few levels nurse you through learning how to do things as you play, while still providing you with a great deal of fun. Before you know it, you'll be commanding two fire teams and a tank.

Finally, the situational awareness is a great feature to help you determine where the bad guys are and to plan your attack. It's a sort of in-game overhead 3D map of the scenario which indicates where the bad guys are and where you are. It pauses the game when you use it, giving you ample time to decide what to do.

Art
Wow! What more can I say. Okay, so the game doesn't make use of any of the new pixel shaders (except maybe the water) and the level geometry really is fairly simple, but the game still looks great. Right off the bat, it starts you off in an exciting combat situation where you and your mean are fighting Germans. There's lots of screaming and shooting. People are dieing around you. Adrenaline pumping goodness. What impressed me the most was that Gearbox actually went to Europe, photographed the locations they wanted to use in the levels, and then built those levels to look as close to real as possible. Most shooters today, even the "historic" ones don't do this. We design our levels to look like what we think they should look, not what they actually look like.

The player uses hand signals when giving commands. Something a lot of tactical shooters are starting to do more frequently. It adds an extra cool touch to giving orders. The in-game cinematics are really impressive. You still have camera control and are able to look around while the cinematics occur, yet you can't actually move anywhere. The cinematics tend to be very dramatic and movie-like. There are some really, and I mean really well done effects such as when mortars explode. The explosions are extremely well done and if they hit close by, you will fall on your butt (if you aren't dead already) and a sort of "shock" effect occurs. The sound becomes muffled. You lose control of your body while you stand back up. It's quite immersive. Little touches like the tank jerking when it fires and dust particles flying up under its treads really show that extra polish.

The menu system is very artsy and well done. You can tell a lot of thought and time went into laying things out, including the level load screens. The in-game HUD is very simple and unobtrusive, but well designed.

Audio
The game audio is as good as it gets. Full orchestral pieces reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan punctuate the emotions behind the characters in the game. The sound effects help you feel the combat. Expect some strong adult language. While I don't necessarily approve of the language, it does a lot to make you feel the immersion. This is not a game for children though. In between each mission, a soldier's voice is heard to read his letters about the situation. It's very dramatic.

Tech
Brothers in Arms uses the Unreal engine. Very solid tech to say the least. I was a little surprised though to find a few bugs. At one point early on, one of the AI was supposed to say something and the game would continue. He didn't say it and the game just hung there. I could do nothing but look around (as it was a "cut scene"). Upon reload it worked fine. Another bug occurred when I was about to man a machine gun in a house. I decided against manning it and hit the jump key and suddenly I was in a strange gunless mode where I could walk around and give orders but had no weapon. Despite these minor bugs, the game was very fun and very playable. The interface for the game is very easy to understand. The AI was mostly scripted, hence keeping them from looking stupid by being over-engineered. I was a little frustrated sometimes when my team AI would stand right out in the open instead of taking cover, but that was fairly rare and I learned to tell them to go to specific cover fast to keep that from happening.

One of the coolest scripted events was watching gliders come gliding into the field you had just cleared for them and coming to a bouncing halt. The physics used for this were very well done. Shooting enemy AI in different body locations seemed to cause them to respond appropriately when they died, making for great variety of death animations.

In Conclusion
There's a lot more I could say about Brothers in Arms, but I think I've given you the key elements that make this game such a worthy contender for your hard earned money. The number of missions is average, but each mission tends to play for quite a while, providing you with a lot of fun. Likewise, as you beat each mission at a certain difficulty, you unlock extra content that can be viewed from the menu. You may find yourself trying to beat the game on all three of the difficulty settings that unlock the content. I know I will.