Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway

Elsewhere, the game's squad-control elements have also been tweaked, with special weapon crews available for your command alongside more traditional fire and assault teams. Although it's initially still a bit fiddly getting your various groups assigned, in place, and tucked out of harm's way as the bullets start to fly, having a bazooka squad or a machinegun team to shred heavy cover or lay down intense suppressing fire opens up a range of new strategic possibilities alongside the traditional "hold and then flank" tactics of the earlier games, and the targeting system with its big blue cursor makes telling people where to go a fairly pain-free process once you get used to it.

Despite the alterations, the basic agenda remains the same, with the series' distinctive suppression meters and tactical map views present and correct. But while many encounters do still encourage the age-old flanking manoeuvre, the initial three chapters of the game we've played at least offer up a wide range of different arenas and scenarios to keep you on your toes, from an assault on a farmhouse under machinegun fire, which requires a slow advance and carefully-timed movements, to a frantic ad-libbed defence of a downed glider in open countryside while the enemy swarms in from all sides. And even if the relative small-scale opening battles are too controlled and formal to live up to the anarchic promise of the game's title, they still provide plenty of tension, and the emphasis is heavily weighted towards adapting your approach for each new situation. It remains to be seen how the pace picks up later on.

Graphically, Hell's Highway is shaping up to be a bit of a mixture, with great art direction - a moonlit fight through a bombed-out hospital is a particular highlight - alongside often slightly limp textures and some fairly unconvincing foliage. And while your cast of comrades are engagingly human, the identikit Germans who pour out from cover at you are not. The lack of enemy character models is an understandable limitation, certainly, but it's also all the more noticeable because of the care lavished on your own team.

At least that means Gearbox is putting the emphasis in the right place, though. In-game chatter means that your team-mates never revert to being mere tools in the heat of battle, and the cut-scenes, filled with mess-tent banter and stoic camaraderie carry a surprising emotional weight. Furthermore, the game's opening, flashing forwards to a cliffhanger two-thirds of the way through the narrative, promises a strong personal story alongside the more elaborate historical events unfolding.

So while Hell's Highway may not be the prettiest game you'll play this year, and there are a few troubling indicators that the AI, though much improved, may not be the most robust available (one team-mate got stuck jogging against the side of a farmhouse for about thirty seconds, and we saw a few isolated moments where enemies stood stock still after their cover had been taken away and we pumped in the bullets), the series retains a careful pacing and attention to human details that makes it seem far more substantial and involving than some of its more arcadey cousins. From what we've seen so far, Gearbox continues to be one of the few developers able to offer up entertainingly explosive games that still manage to treat history as more than just a simple playground.