There haven’t really been a lot of newcomers into the survival horror genre. Most of the titles released have come from pre-established franchises, with gameplay mechanics and story threads that are well known and debated by fans of the series. As a result, trying to establish a new franchise in the genre can be an even steeper uphill battle — the story, game mechanics, characters and scares have to be even stronger than most games to interest and even pull away fans of other franchises. This is the kind of challenge that Dead Space, EA Redwood Shore’s upcoming game, faced because it was set in a completely new universe of survival horror (in more ways than one), one that EA has been supplementing with an animated movie, comic book and other assets. Fortunately for horror fans, Dead Space is a great example of the genre and is an awesome way to launch a franchise that could continue for many years to come.

The story behind Dead Space takes place hundreds of years in the future, during a time when mankind has exhausted all of the natural resources on Earth. Fortunately, in this dire time, humanity has mastered space travel, and a process known as planet cracking has been developed to combat this drought. A celestial body is split into pieces, and its minerals are strip-mined and melted, returning the byproducts to Earth for consumption. An entire fleet of ships sails the stars performing these tasks, and the crown jewel of this mining fleet is the USG Ishimura, which has performed more planet cracks that any other vessel. However, on a routine mission, the ship cuts off all communication from galactic command, which is somewhat strange. To discover what’s going on, a small maintenance crew is quickly dispatched to the Ishimura from a nearby vessel.

Players step into the boots of Isaac Clarke, a systems engineer that’s part of the dispatched maintenance crew. Outside of fixing the communications issues, Isaac has a number of reasons for arriving on the Ishimura — he has a number of friends that are stationed on the ship, including someone very special to him that sends an urgent holovid with a few cryptic messages before she disappears. Unfortunately for Isaac and his crew, shortly after they arrive on board the crippled vessel, all hell breaks loose. Their craft is destroyed, leaving them stranded on the Ishimura. The crew is attacked by nightmarish creatures known as Necromorphs, who kill most of Isaac’s team and separate him from the surviving members. Even worse, the ship and its systems have started to be corrupted or are failing thanks to the Necromorphic infestation. It’s up to Isaac to wander the halls, search for any friends or survivors that are still alive, and fix as many problems as he can until he can find a way to escape the ship, which can take you 12 or more hours to complete.

Isaac isn’t the typical hero that you’d find in most sci-fi games; he doesn’t walk into the Ishimura packing a firearm or grenades, nor does he have specialized training. Apart from the first one that Isaac finds on a workbench, all of Isaac’s weaponry and items are found via schematics that are scattered across the ship. Only one of them is a true firearm — the security pulse rifle; the rest of his “guns” are repurposed pieces of mining equipment used for planet cracking. However, Isaac can use his engineering knowledge to make these weapons much more powerful by analyzing their blueprints and rewiring them at workbenches with the use of power nodes. Thanks to these nodes, Isaac can improve their performance in a number of ways, such as carrying more rounds, shortening his reload time, or increasing their damage. This upgrade system even expands to Isaac’s space suit, which can be improved to strengthen his suit’s armor or his air supply in case he enters a vacuum. He can even use the nodes to augment the stasis or kinesis modules, which can be used to freeze monsters as they charge him or propel items into the creatures, respectively. What’s creative about this system is that players won’t be able to max out every weapon or every bit of gear that they have in one playthrough; this forces them to choose what they’ll specialize in as they go through the ship.

This is an important decision to make, particularly because some weapons are more effective against the Necromorphs than others, and since you’ll need to use strategic dismemberment to weaken and effectively kill them, the right weapon in the right situation can be the fine line between life or death in the game. See, unlike monsters in other games, Necromorphs will shrug off direct attacks to the head or chest and keep coming for more. Blasting their limbs off is the only way to cause enough damage to kill these beasts, and you’ll frequently need to focus on aiming accurately and quickly at these weak spots before you’re surrounded and dissected yourself. This is particularly true in later stages, when some of the Necromorphs start moving faster than before, and it frequently turns battles into brutal affairs, with severed arms and legs flying everywhere as you attempt to survive the onslaught of creatures. Thanks to the over-the-shoulder, third-person perspective, this can add an extra level of tension to the game while you’re fending off swarms of beasts, but be forewarned: there is no quick turnaround command. While some people may consider this to be a problem, this is actually a wise design decision because it makes you feel much more vulnerable and claustrophobic within the confines of the suit, and whether you’re moving through a hallway covered in bodies or floating in a zero gravity environment, you always feel as though something could reach out and kill you at any time.

In fact, the atmospherics of the game play a large role in adding and heightening the tension that players experience as they move through the Ishimura. Although there are plenty of jump moments, the game isn’t simply about the cheap scare as it is tossing you into an area that descends from bad to worse. As soon as you step on board the ship, you automatically get the sense that something is wrong. Everything from suitcases and books to work suits and tools are scattered around. As you go further in, you realize how violent and horrible the situation on board the Ishimura must have been, with limbs, blood-spattered walls and other gory scenes that are directly out of an abattoir. It only gets stranger as you move into more Necromorph-infested areas, with sections of the ship completely engulfed in a flesh-like material that pulses and quivers with a life of its own.

The unsettling nature of the world is heightened by the fact that there is no specific HUD to speak of — Isaac’s health is presented on his back, his ammunition is holographically projected above the gun, and incoming transmissions that he receives pop up in front of his face. Even checking his inventory is pulled up via holograms, and it is done in real time, meaning that a Necromorph can come crawling through the floor or leap from a vent behind you and strike you at any time. Because you’re never removed from the action, you feel much more immersed in the world, which is only added to with the environmental items scattered around the ship. Messages scrawled in blood, text and audio messages that detail what happened on board the ship, and even Isaac’s notes to himself in his personal journal add to a sense that this is a ship that no one should be on or even near if they value their life, which is an impressive way to balance the story with the action of the game presented in front of them.

Along with these startling sights, horror fans will pick up on influences from a wide variety of horror movies that are scattered through the game. Obvious connections of elements found in Dead Space can be tied to Event Horizon, the Alien Quadrilogy, John Carpenter’s The Thing, Night of the Living Dead and more. But even more impressive than the large pedigree of game influences is the fact that it manages to weave a carefully balanced narrative that uses the best elements of these films with a lot plausible twists and turns within the story. Not only does the game lay down the foundation of why things went wrong on the Ishimura, it sets up the game to be the launching point for a franchise, and the universe of Dead Space is definitely large enough to support a vast series after this title.

Although the atmospherics add a lot to the game, Dead Space isn’t without issues that hamper some elements of play. The zero gravity areas are a bit strange because even though you can see legitimate areas that you could propel yourself to, you can’t always leap there. Frequently, you’ll need to make a shorter jump that’s closer and then hop to the original target. While that seems a bit nonsensical, the other problem that occurs within the zero gravity space is that in these spaces, the camera can sometimes be restricted to show a specific perspective, particularly if you happen to be on a wall or a ceiling. Unfortunately, when the camera locks up during these moments, you can sometimes get attacked by some creature outside of your peripheral vision, which sucks. It can be extremely frustrating, especially when you’re trying to dodge one monster only to get hit from behind by something that you could have seen if you’d only move one or two steps to the side, which suddenly releases the camera from being stuck.

Another issue within the title is that there’s a lot of backtracking within the game. It all makes sense in the context of the gameplay, especially when you’re going through each situation; instead of being a meaningless fetch quest, it’s completely plausible that you’d have to return to one area you’ve previously moved through once you discover that one vital piece of equipment you need to fix something is stored there. However, it does have a way of making the ship feel much smaller than a massive capital ship. That’s not to say that you get this sense throughout the entire game, because there are plenty of spaces like the medical, engineering and mining decks where you’ll move through large areas, but the repetition can be a bit disappointing. This is particularly heightened with the sometimes flawed nav icon. By pressing in on the right analog stick, a holographic line moves out from Isaac and points him in the right direction to go, even turning him to face the right way. The problem that comes up with this system is that every now and then, the game will spin Isaac in a circle, projecting a line that goes forward a few feet before doubling back on itself and pointing the opposite way. That’s just bad navigation logic.

As an aside, another strange feature that isn’t a horribly bad or major issue is the fact that your foot stomp can be surprisingly powerful, destroying boxes or other items from a rather large distance. Typically, you’d expect that you’d only be able to crush something that was below your boot, but for some reason, you can crush a box suspended on a bench above you or floating in zero gravity. It’s an odd choice, and a minor gripe that’s humorous when you see it, but it does stand out as an oddity.

However, one of the last issues that I have with the title is related to the New Game + feature. As I mentioned before, you won’t be able to acquire every single upgrade for the game itself during your first playthrough. Fortunately, once you beat the game, you’ll unlock five separate items, including a fourth difficulty mode previously hidden from the main menu. You’ll also be able to move back through the story with all of your equipment intact, so you can blast your way through the game quicker. However, you’ll be locked on the initial difficulty level that you chose when you started the game, and won’t have the opportunity to switch. This can make the second playthrough feel a bit skewed because it’s quite easy to fly through with an over-augmented Isaac. If you return to the main menu and choose a higher difficulty level (including the unlocked Impossible mode) you lose these upgrades and have to start over, which is rather disappointing.

Whether you spend an hour or a day exploring the Ishimura, you’ll definitely be struck by the visuals of Dead Space, which are eye-catching for both their detail and their gore factor. The detail placed into Isaac’s suit is excellent, particularly as you upgrade it throughout the game, and the same can be said about the weapons themselves, which gain new visual and audio effects when you’ve maxed out their schematics with power nodes. The holographic implementation within the game is excellently done as well and is quite notable because of how it supplements the gameplay. The fact that you can rotate the camera around Isaac as he watches a video in front of him or that you notice little touches like Isaac’s head moving up and down to acknowledge the holographic inventory screen highlights a lot of the great visuals in the game. On top of this, each level truly feels like its own, and whether it’s the white walls that denote the medical decks, the poster-filled entertainment and housing levels, or the industrial mining sections, you get an idea of what these futuristic planet cracking ships are like. It’s even more striking when you move into zero gravity areas and tumble through different areas, including the starkness of space.

However, all of this visual discussion isn’t even counting the disturbing character models of the Necromorphs themselves, which appear to be more and more freakish with each creature that you run into. Whether it’s the tentacles and limbs that are placed in unnatural areas or the mutating forms that emerge from errant shots, the Necromorphs are quite unsettling to see, and even more unnerving when they come flying towards you. The same can be said for the gore and dismemberment, which is predominant throughout the game. Whether it’s Isaac getting his head bitten off or impaled, or wandering through floors that are stocked with the fallen crewmembers of the Ishimura, the gore is both striking and appropriate to the gameplay. There are two things that I’m not crazy about: first, in the space or zero gravity areas, whenever the space gets depressurized, the pixilated visuals to show air being sucked out of an airlock or room doesn’t look great compared to the rest of the game. My second and much more infrequent issue with the graphics is the slight slowdown that can occur, particularly during large explosions.

Supporting the strong visuals is excellent voice acting across the board. While Isaac never utters a word, the other members of the cast perform their lines quite well, whether that’s with an audio journal log or a holographic movie. However, the real standout is the use of sound, which is designed to send shivers up the player’s spine. Whether it’s the skittering through the walls of Necromorphs that are crawling towards you, the screams from the creatures as you blow off their legs, or the sudden sharp noises released as a jump moment occurs, the sound design is fantastic and really draws you into the game action. This is one of those games that you want to just listen to late at night with the lights off if you’re looking to get freaked out.

If you’re looking for more on Dead Space, check out the Insider head to head here.

Closing Comments

Call it science fiction survival horror, but Dead Space does the genre proud with an engaging story; action that’s tense, fast-paced and extremely violent; as well as atmospheric qualities that will get under your skin and make you jump. It may be a newcomer, but the seeds of an incredible franchise have been sown, and EA’s in a great position to reap a phenomenal franchise full of scares. If you like survival horror, action or sci-fi, Dead Space needs to be on your radar.

Adventures in Time is an attempt to bring Pac-Man back to his roots, but with surprisingly solid 3D graphics, good level design, and a few new gameplay features.When the original Pac-Man hit arcades well over a decade ago, it was an instant hit because of its distinctive graphics and simple yet challenging and addicting gameplay. Since then, there have been a number of games featuring the jovial pellet-eating hero, all of which tried to capitalize on his fame. In most cases, these attempts proved unsuccessful, which has caused the Pac-Man license to lose much of the popularity it accumulated in its early arcade days. The latest effort, Pac-Man: Adventures in Time, is an attempt to bring Pac-Man back to his roots, but with surprisingly solid 3D graphics, good level design, and a few new gameplay features.

The most impressive aspect of Pac-Man: Adventures in Time is the graphics. The colorful 3D graphics and the overhead perspective do a great job of giving Adventures in Time a brand-new appearance while still retaining the same simple colors and shapes as in the original game. In the Ancient Egypt levels, there are Pac-Man hieroglyphs on the walls that are clear and vibrantly colored; even hieroglyphs that seem to have deteriorated over time or are covered in sand are clearly noticeable. The game also effectively uses some full-motion video effects in some of the later stages, such as the train stage, where the scenery rushes by as Pac-Man jumps from car to car while collecting pellets. You’ll also notice subtle lighting effects that highlight Pac-Man’s robust shape, but they’re not quite as apparent in some stages as they are in others. Adventures in Time also manages to retain a brisk frame rate even on a machine with the minimum system requirements.

Pac-Man’s transition into a lush, fully 3D world introduces some new twists to the classic Pac-Man gameplay. Instead of restricting a stage to one single flat maze, you can make Pac-Man run up walls, slide down or climb up hills, and use elevators to reach different platforms. These new environmental features are incorporated seamlessly into the traditional Pac-Man gameplay thanks to the game’s solid level design. For instance, obstacles are used in such a manner that they don’t just block your progress, but they are actually a well-integrated part of the level. One stage places you in the middle of a cave that slopes down toward the middle where a sleeping dragon is located, and every time the dragon takes a deep breath and exhales, it spews a fireball that travels down a particular part of the maze. Another level takes place in the middle of a medieval jousting tournament as two jousters travel back and forth across a particular section of the level. In the various Egyptian levels, you’ll see baskets that contain snakes that will lunge at you if you get too close. There are even environmental objects within the levels that can aid you in your task, such as during one of the Wild West levels that takes place in a saloon with a piano. You can actually run by the piano to make it play, which causes the ghost monsters chasing after you to completely ignore you as they start dancing uncontrollably. In addition, different types of terrain in each of the levels can cause Pac-Man to slow down and speed up accordingly, which can make it challenging to judge how close you are to one of the ghosts or an obstacle - especially in the later levels when the ghosts speed up and the obstacles become more difficult to avoid.

Pac-Man has a number of new abilities to help him navigate the terrain and capture pellets. Now you can make Pac-Man jump to avoid ghosts, boulders, or any other dangerous obstacles that might be in your way. Unfortunately Pac-Man doesn’t really get a chance to use his new abilities that often because it can be very difficult to properly time a jump to avoid danger. Controlling Pac-Man also becomes an issue in the later levels because Pac-Man moves in whatever direction you point him in, and he doesn’t stop moving in that direction until pointed otherwise, which makes the game’s control seem sluggish and unresponsive when you’re trying to make sharp turns as a ghost chases you.

The game offers three different multiplayer modes that are equally well-done twists on the classic game. The best of these modes is ghost tag, where you must tag your opponents in order to change back into Pac-Man form and capture enough pellets to beat out the other competitors. Unfortunately, there is no online player-matching service included with the game, so finding an online multiplayer game may be difficult, but Adventures in Time does have a hot-seat option for four players at one computer, and you can also play against computer-controlled opponents.

Pac-Man: Adventures in Time attempts to take the classic Pac-Man formula and adapt it to a three-dimensional world and succeeds at doing so while still retaining the classic sense of the original game. The single-player levels, as well as the multiplayer modes and the minigames, all keep Adventures in Time from becoming repetitive too quickly, though in essence it’s still just a remake of the classic Pac-Man. The occasionally sluggish control can be a little frustrating but not enough to take the fun out of the game.

The gaming industry has frequently strip mined the battlefields of World War II for content, but few of the titles released have covered the action or the tales of the soldiers in the field like Gearbox’s Brothers in Arms series. Following the footsteps and drawing from the experiences of the actual 502nd Parachute Infantry, 101st Airborne Division from World War II, the titles in the series have always delivered a glimpse at the men on the front lines, including their thoughts and fears in the midst of seemingly overwhelming odds. The latest installment of the game takes the men away from the fields and farms of France into one of World War II’s most colossal failures for the allies. But while Brothers In Arms: Hell’s Highway maintains its solid story presentation and its traditional gameplay, technical issues hamper this title, keeping it from being an impressive or great shooter.The story of Hell’s Highway revolves around Operation Market Garden, a plan designed by Field Marshal Montgomery to end the war before Christmas of 1944 by capturing a highway through Holland and punching through enemy lines into the heart of Germany. While it was the largest airborne invasion in the history of the world, the Allies didn’t know that Hitler’s best soldiers and tank divisions were in the surrounding area. After initial success, the Nazis surrounded and crushed the Allied troops, leading to the last significant Nazi victory of the war. Hell’s Highway is set against this backdrop of the war, telling the tale of Staff Sergeant Matt Baker and his squad as they try to survive the hazards of Holland that are constantly thrown their way.

The story is particularly trying for Baker, who was always an introspective character in the previous games. Often stoic and measured in his thought during down time in between missions, the weight of the war has obviously started to weigh heavily upon Baker. Much of his time throughout the game is spent thinking about (or perhaps remorsefully reflecting on) the deaths of many of the previous soldiers under his command. This stress and pressure seems to be manifesting itself in the early stages of shell shock, and there are even some moments where Baker’s mental state is called into question by both himself and his squadmates. It’s rare that you see a title handle material like this with sensitivity, care and respect, and Gearbox does a great job of taking this serious and life changing condition that affects many soldiers and depicting it realistically.

In fact, the story itself, which covers everything from the first few hours of Operation Market Garden through the ninth and final day of the mission when the Allies were forced to retreat, Hell’s Highway tells an incredible tale. However, you don’t have to know the story of the previous games in the series to catch up on the characters in the platoon (though you gain a better sense of how these men have developed if you do); the cinematics and flashbacks will fill in newcomers with more than enough info to explain the plot. Even better, the title provides a comprehensive history of the operation thanks to the in-game Recon Reports, giving a full sense of the magnitude of the mission and how flawed it eventually was. If you’ve seen HBO’s Band of Brothers, Hell’s Highway feels like a lost episode of the show, and has the sense of scale and cinematic grandeur that you’d expect from Hollywood.

As far as the standard gameplay mechanics are concerned, Hell’s Highway plays out exactly like the previous titles in the game, so veterans of the series will have no problem dropping into a warzone and attacking the Nazis. For beginners, however, you’ll quickly learn that this title is a much more methodical shooter than you might be accustomed to. Simply running ahead and trying to blast anyone in sight is a quick way to get put in a body bag; instead, players will have to dig into cover, leaning out or popping up to take aim and blast the enemy from safety. You’ll also have to effectively control individual teams, pinning down threats with suppressing fire from one location so that you or another squad can flank them and eliminate the enemy.

There are three separate kinds of teams that you’ll be able to direct, such as a fire team who are great for initially suppressing enemies, assault teams that are good for flanking attacks and special weapons squads, like machine gun or bazooka crews, who are ideal for eliminating entrenched enemies or platoons of enemies.

Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each squad, as well as adequately using their skills to destroy enemies, is a key tactic of the game. The same can be said of the newly included destructible cover, which forces players to carefully consider what they’ve put themselves and their teams behind. For instance, objects like barrels, fences and sandbags can be chewed to pieces from machine gun fire, or blown to bits with well thrown grenades or bazooka rounds. By targeting and destroying these objects, players can control the battlefield by flushing soldiers out into the open, easily cutting them down with your fire. Blowing apart the cover of a machine gun nest or an entrenched squad with a rocket and clearing out the area with a burst of fire is extremely satisfying, and adds a great twist to the gameplay. This is particularly true when you realize that your soldiers are intelligent enough to open fire on soldiers if they perceive a threat to their location, although you’ll have to command them to use any special weapons like a bazooka.

Unfortunately, your teams are sometimes stupid when it comes to responding to commands maneuvering them to safety, which is one of the core gameplay mechanics. For example, you’ll tell soldiers to run over in cover and dig in behind a low rock wall, intentionally placing the command ring behind the middle of the structure to ensure the safety of your troops. Unfortunately, instead of running under cover and crouching, your soldiers will sometimes run directly in front of enemy positions and leap over the wall, frequently getting turned into Swiss cheese. Even worse are the moments where you clearly direct them behind a wall and instead of digging in behind the wall, they dig in on the side of the wall, again leaving themselves open to fire. This is a problem that has always existed within previous Brothers In Arms games, but you’d think that it would have been fixed by now.

Even stranger are the moments where you start to push forward by yourself on the battlefield, calling your soldiers to form up behind you, only to see a team that you know is at least thirty or forty yards behind you get warped up ahead of your position. In these situations, you’ll find the teleporting squad running towards you, which makes absolutely no sense and also leaves these guys free to be blasted by enemies ahead of your location. How and why this works is completely unexplainable. Then again, this issue isn’t solely held to your troops; the enemy AI will perform nonsensical actions as well. For the most part, they’ll attempt to flank you, find cover and pour on a large amount of gunfire on your positions, making progress extremely difficult. However, there are times where the AI will simply stand in the open and disregard incoming gunfire or explosions, not moving a muscle until you get within an unspecified proximity that seems to trigger them coming to life.
There are two problems of this triggered response. The first is that it simply doesn’t feel realistic at all, and takes you out of the atmosphere of the battlefield into an obvious simulation. The second — and more serious issue — is that the enemies will frequently shrug off this damage as if it never occurred, which feels extremely flawed. Like I said, it doesn’t happen all of the time, but when it does, it stands out like a sore thumb. Also, as an aside — what’s with the guns aimed in one direction that manage to fire in a completely different one? You can watch as your bazooka team will aim true north and watch as the shell goes rocketing off northwest, or look at a Nazi machine gunner aiming at another squad, yet his bullets come flying in your direction. That’s a weird visual glitch that seems tied to these AI issues…

You’ll notice this especially during the solo sections of the game, where you no longer command a squad and instead act on your own. This is slightly understandable during the tank sections, where you act as a tank commander and his crew blasting your way through a section of battlefield. However, it’s somewhat odd to witness Baker going off alone as much as he does in Hell’s Highway. Considering that a large amount of the game emphasizes team tactics, Baker has a lot of moments where he runs through sections by himself, taking out soldiers or objectives. In a way, these solo segments make the game feel a lot more like “Brother In Arms: Baker’s Odyssey. While there isn’t anything explicitly wrong with these missions, it feels somewhat unrealistic to see a platoon commanding officer going solo on missions, especially the house-to-house fighting which was so deadly in some European towns.

Visually, the title is truly a hit or miss affair, which is unfortunate considering how solid the storytelling elements are. There are some nice details that will pop up here and there, such as particle effects during explosions as well as building details and rubble as you go through villages. What’s more, the cinematic slow motion shots that zoom in and focus on kill shots during attacks, such as head shots or grenades that rip limbs off are excellent. However, this is balanced with some elements that look terrible on these systems, such as the flat and unimpressive 2D grass and flower textures that you’ll continually run past. Flame looks like a generic stylized rendition of the element that’s pasted onto 3D objects. There’s plenty of clipping, and you’ll easily witness a lack of collision detection for many instances of character movement. You’ll also find that a lot of slowdown and render pop-in constantly show up during cutscenes, which is disappointing. The final problem is the grain filter that affects everything with an unnatural look, from shadows that look downright pixilated to skin textures that have a funky sheen to them. It’s sad because these graphics can really distract you from the battlefield experience.

That is particularly true within the multiplayer game, which just feels tagged on. Since most of the experience is truly contained within the single-player experience, you get the sense that having a battlefield with up to twenty players fighting it out across the limited maps in the game was just a mild nod to those players looking for a little extra, but it’s somewhat disappointing. Your only objective is to raise or lower flags at two locations on the map, or eliminate the enemy squad, but the visuals in this mode feel as though they’ve been intentionally downgraded to allow for the twenty player cap.
The sound for Hell’s Highway fortunately makes up for some of the visual downfalls of the game, with a score that feels pulled directly from a war film. Swelling orchestral pieces punctuate dramatic moments of the game, and you almost feel as though a composer was intentionally underscoring the action of the game to showcase the feats of Baker’s squad. Lines delivered by these soldiers are quite nice as well, although they do tend to continually repeat the same phrases over and over, which has always been more of an instruction to you to help them out in the middle of battle. However, when you’ve just directed a squad to go for cover and you hear them yell out, “Why aren’t we moving,” when they’re being fired on, it just feels like a bad disconnect of logic. The other dialogue in the game is pretty good however, from the guys asking the Germans why they’re still fighting in the middle of a losing battle to calling out their ammo states. However, just to warn some parents, there is some adult language here. While you can turn it off, it does feel appropriate to the situations and the men in the midst of battle.

Closing Comments
The Airborne soldiers that fought and lived through the horrors of World War II, and particularly that Operation Market Garden deserve respect, honor, and tales that highlight their sacrifices on the field of battle (as all soldiers do). Brothers In Arms: Hell’s Highway does an excellent job of presenting the story of these men, and is as compelling as many war movies. While many of the franchise’s traditional gameplay elements return, such as the tactical controls of squads, so do the issues associated with those controls. Tie in some questionable visuals and AI issues, and you have a title that’s good, but not great.