Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway Hands On

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Playing from scratch, you'll be eased into your role gently. Chapter 1 (each one contains multiple missions) is just you and your gun, as your familiarise yourself with the basic controls. It's not until Chapter 2 that you get to call the shots.

But any confusion we're experiencing is mainly because we're approaching Hell's Highway in the wrong way. Seeing us flapping, John Antal offers some sage advice: stop firing completely and let your troops do the work. The penny drops.

Black Friday takes place in the Dutch town of Veghel, during a torrential downpour. This gives Gearbox the chance to show off its admittedly lovely rain effects: water plummets relentlessly from the heavens, rebounding realistically off concrete; puddles collect and swell covincingly. It's all very, well, wet.

Pitchford can't resist bigging up the power of the game's modified Unreal Engine 3: "It's the engine that powered Gears of War," he notes, unnecessarily. "We've worked a lot on this technology; so you're seeing fidelity that's about 15-20 percent higher than Gears of War." Well, to us Hell's Highway lacks the wow factor of a Call Of Duty 4, say, or even a Gears of War. But it's very clearly a looker, and the level of detail is hugely impressive, once you start appreciating little touches like the way wooden cover is ripped asunder by bullets.

As an example of the game's tactical mechanics in action, a town plaza we're tasked with securing fits the bill perfectly. With bazooka and range-of-fire teams at our disposal, and Nazis camped in a sandbag-shielded gazebo and around the perimeter, creative use of suppressive fire and flanking is essential. The bazooka team, for instance, can blow right through the sandbags while Baker lays down suppressive fire; then, while your range-of-fire team attacks from one side, you can sneak around the back and pick off foes through where their cover has been literally blown.

Thousand-yard stubble.

You can switch between teams under your command via the B button on 360, then order them to change position or attack by holding the left-trigger and pointing at the desired location. And a tactical map, accessed via the Back button, is a useful way of planning out a raid with chess-like precision. Despite the early confusion of multi-tasking under duress, clearing an area with patience and pinpoint accuracy, while keeping your squad alive, is immensely satisfying - as is the 'Action Cam', which highlights the most outrageous kills with an instant slow-mo close-up. Watch those body parts fly.

We see all three versions of the game running at UbiDays. There's little to choose between 360 and PS3 at an admittedly cursory glance, but on PC it definitely has the visual edge.

Gearbox also showed off one of the tank-based missions. This looked fairly run-of-the-mill (we didn't get to play it), with a main turret and mounted rifle available if you risk your neck up top; or just the turret if you'd rather cower inside. You can't climb in and out of a tank mid-mission, but these third-person sections should at least provide variety with their necessarily more mindless action.

So, with two months to go, we're clearly impressed by the brief sections we've experienced directly, and excited by the potential of shooter that promises a refreshing, more cerebral change of pace to raise it above the sardine-tin similitude of much of the genre. And while the series' Saving Private Ryan-esque sentimentalism might prove too cloying for some, if Baker's exploits can tug at the heartstrings the way they engage the brain, we'll be more than happy to make the trip to certain doom along Hell's Highway.