Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway

A good solo experience that is slightly held back by too much emphasis on the older games, a few other niggles also start to grate after a while and the whole game just doesn’t last long enough. It’s a good starting point for the franchise on the 360 though but it’s not going to displace the likes of COD 4 any time soon.

The tedium of what makes this game good in the first place makes it somewhat of a charlatan, but so long as routine and predictability is the in-thing, you'll be okay.

Hell's Highway represents little more than a solid evolution of the original, as opposed to being a game which takes strategic World War II gaming to dizzy new heights. With an engaging but ultimately repetitive play mechanic at its core, it's a game which deserves a decent amount of respect, but whose charms wane rather than grow as the game progresses.

It doesn’t do what it says on the tin, doesn’t break any barriers and is mildly dull as often as interesting but when you’re in the middle of crossfires, your squads do what they’re told and you know that you’re about to blow up a whole mess of Nazis, it’s pretty good.

A diverting tactical shooter curbed by ageing design principles, flawed story-telling and run-of-the-mill tech. Easily the best Brothers in Arms title so far, but after three years in development we were expecting something more evolutionary.

Few World War II video games are as gripping and brutal as Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway.

Overall Brothers In Arms is a game that had all the groundbreaking ideas, however having taken so long to have been released it has missed the boat slightly.

A nice evolution of its predecessor rather than been a true revolution of the developers efforts from last gen.

The player needs to be given much more freedom.

Aspiration got the best of this title - it ultimately promises more than it delivers.

All in all, considering that the overall gameplay mechanic is a rinse and repeat exercise of duck and cover shooting coupled with a partially fractured command interface, it's hard to recommend Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway to anyone other than hardened series fanatics.

The problem is that Hell's Highway doesn't make me care about the characters as much as the other installments did.

As the third installment in the series, Hell's Highway does a great job recreating the atmosphere and surroundings featuring Dutch's Operation Market Garden in the WW2. Despite the core mechanics remain untouched, this combined shooter with some sort of tactical component feels somehow repetitive over the missions, misled on the plot and definately could use a little more polish on its technical side. Overall entertaining but could be improved.

Brothers in Arms seems to wish they were cool enough to eat lunch with Band of Brothers and ends up taking itself all too seriously. It is an earnest backdrop for a game in which the "fun part" is supposed to be blowing people into tiny bits.

To continually repackage the same hackneyed take on real pain, real suffering, and real people in the mane of entertainment is a sure road to exploitation. [Nov 2008, p.112]

Gearbox has made a game that is stable and complete, if hugely unrefined in places, with an under-exploited but sound core of tactical squad combat. [Nov 2008, p.93]

There will obviously be another in the series, by which time Gearbox Software will have hopefully managed to tame both their engine and the irksome controls, and ultimately provide the game experience that this title should have been.

Sadly, Brothers In Arms: Hell’s Highway looks destined to become yet another also-ran in the great yuletide arms race of 2008. It may hold your attention for a while but don’t get your hopes up.

We've been waiting two years longer than we expected for Hell's Highway and the wait has bought little reward.

The game is an intense shooting gallery, despite the repetition, yet the set-up, landscape, and gameplay feel so familiar at this point that it borders on boring.

Online multiplayer in Hell’s Highway depends too much on your teammates adhering to their assigned roles.