A major theme of the series is the feeling of guilt that haunts the protagonists as people die under their command. Fatalities are all delivered in cutscenes outside of your control and therefore outside your responsibility. You can become attached to characters but their deaths are all scripted into the story. SWAT 4 and the original Ghost Recon excelled at creating an tense engagements from which the casualties were persistent but both suffered from the fiddliness of having to give highly specific orders to individual squad members.īrothers in Arms would benefit from cutting back on the rigid story and instead allow for more emergent narratives. Thanks to the simplicity of controls you’re not pulled out of the experience by the frustrations of micromanagement. Suppress the enemy, out position them and finish them off with flanking shots or grenades.There is a real satisfaction in solving these puzzles when the level design is at its best. Winning fights requires all the pieces at your disposal. Your weapons are deliberately inaccurate (the oddly laser-like Kar 98 aside) and death is swift. This emphasis on teamwork with your squad made Brothers in Arms stand out from other popular shooters at the time. It gives a great sense of place to your character as a part of the military machine and the head of a unit rather than the gung-ho leader who will single-handedly shoot their way to Berlin. Orders aren’t just virtually transmitted, every command has your character yelling it to the squad with accompanying tactical hand signals. Despite the now ageing graphics, this aspect of the game still feels tense and immersive. How you position yourself on the battlefield becomes as important as positioning your squads. To get your squad into a great flank position, you first need to get yourself into the right place to give that order. Need your squad to pin down a machine gun? You need to actually stick your neck out to point and yell at it. Your position on the battlefield limits the orders you can give. I’m so used to giving orders from a comfy isometric perspective in the sky in other tactics games, that being locked into the rubbish field of vision that run of the mill human eyes give you creates some interesting challenges. It manages to nail the “boots on the ground” experience that Call of Duty spent most of 2017 banging on about. Despite a slightly dated control scheme, the contextual single button to issue commands is brilliant. ![]() ![]() The squad system has so much potential that it’s a real shame we haven’t seen more games make use of it. The games created a robust, yet simple squad system that allowed you to focus on the combat situation without having to worry about too much micromanagement. The core of the game revolves around solving combat scenarios with the squads under your command. The first two games, Road to Hill 30 and Earned in Blood, both released in 2005, take you through the Normandy campaign while Hell’s Highway (2008) follows the unit during the ill-fated Operation Market Garden. Brothers in Arms focused on paratroopers from the American 101st Airborne Division. It’s been ten years since a Brothers in Arms game has been released, yet the series captured small squad tactics in a way I haven’t seen since.
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