World War II happened sixty years ago, and only once. So what do you do if you want to take back France and shoot a lot of Nazis today? Since the very same war has probably happened to various degrees millions of times on computers and consoles the world over, well, it's obvious: grab a videogame. But, we have, in our excited rush, created another dilemma! Which of the many serves up the best experience!? Luckily, Ubisoft and Gearbox were wondering the same thing, and rather than going through the bother of selecting one of the current half-dozen or so strong contenders (and this they could have easily done, and then called it a day and made with the LANning), they made their own. Worry no more; Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 packs a Panzer tank's weight in atmosphere for each bullet you and your men fire from behind dubious cover.

The game probably isn't like something you've already played. It's a squad-based FPS, yes, but it feels, at times, very much like a primitive, simple RTS (real-time strategy) game. Furthermore, it's setup to be a lot like HBO's “Band of Brothers,” and focuses on one group of soldiers in much the same way, though as obviated by the F and P in FPS it mainly deals with Baker, your character. It doesn't develop the feeling of camaraderie quite as thoroughly as the lauded series, but it does a pretty good job nonetheless, especially considering its genre.

Brothers in Arms opens on the seventh day after the storming of the Normandy beaches with a completely unwinnable battle for the titular hill. You're in a trench with your men, getting showered with German fire. You haven't familiarized yourself with the controls; no story has been presented to you. You have no idea what you're doing.

Then the German tanks roll in.

You still have no idea what you're doing, only now you're doing it as an impervious behemoth of a weapon slowly rotates its top half, bringing a yards-long barrel down to stare you right in the face. Then something explodes out of it, and you're blown back. Lying on the ground. Still in first person view. You can see, and your hearing returns. One of your men jumps up, challenging the Nazis with rash stupidity. He waves a pistol in the air and yells. Then, louder gunshots, and a thud as his body lands a few feet from you, bloody and dead. As you look at his glasses, and marvel that they're still on his face, another soldier shuffles over to you and yells your name. He gets harder and harder to hear as everything goes dark, and then the screen is black.

An “Ubisoft presents” message appears. War is hell, amigo. (In the main game, should everything happen to go black like this several times in a row, you'll get a similar message: “War is sometimes hell, but a videogame shouldn't be,” and the option to heal your men. Clever, and helpful if you need it.) 

It's a dramatic opening five minutes, to be sure, and you're in for another dramatic five before the game proper starts.  It's D-Day, and you and your men are getting ready to jump out of your plane when the aircraft is hit. Then everyone is falling, and you can look around at the pumping AA guns and floating soldiers as you parachute into a tree. You're alright, though, which is good, because just up the road some of your buddies have already congregated and are waiting to teach you the game mechanics.

They're really solid mechanics, too. You've got your basic FPS controls and actions, which function as usual, but it's the squad tactics that make the game stand out. By default, the left trigger is in charge of commands (black is for throwing grenades); pull it and a circle appears on the ground in front of you. You can move it around with your thumbsticks. When you let go of the trigger, the selected unit (you typically command one or two units of two or three men each) will move to the spot you've selected for them, and make use of cover if it's there. If you aim at an enemy while in this order-issuing mode, and then release the trigger, your men will concentrate fire on that guy (instead of just going about their general AI-controlled shooting business). If, while aiming at an enemy with the left trigger pulled, you pull the right trigger, why, you've just issued an assault order, and your men will rush to overpower the unlucky Nazi. A quick tap of the white button toggles between units (if you have command of more than one), and a longer press instructs the group to fall in and follow your lead. It's not a complicated system, but it's very fast, very intuitive and very effective. 

In addition to your controls, lots of the UI stuff has been left up to you. You can choose whether or not to use an aiming reticle for when you're not sighting down the barrel of your weapon (right trigger click) and what type to use if you do prefer one. The game also has a “suppression indicator” that appears above the heads of enemies and is visible through terrain and other gameworld objects – fully red means that an enemy is in no way inconvenienced by Allied fire, and fully grey means the German will be ducking and hiding behind the nearest cover, every now and then taking a quick peek to see if the coast is clear. This can be turned off, which not only makes it more difficult to guess what an enemy will do but also to guess where he is. There are five sensitivity levels for the analog sticks (BiA's fasting setting is still slower than Halo's, though, for comparison), and a wonderful brightness slider. As far as I'm concerned, no options are missing – I haven't had to curse the creators for leaving out some tiny but important toggle, and, wonderfully, you can accomplish all of this from the pause menu.

Once you're settings are configured, there's nothing holding you back from battle. Fighting in BiA is based on one main premise: flanking. The general idea is to use one squad to lay down suppressing fire on an enemy position and then to sneak around (using yourself or another unit) until you have a lethal angle on the unsuspecting enemy. Advance, repeat. There is very little fighting that doesn't play out in this manner, and practically no running and gunning. That said, it doesn't get boring. There are hundreds of flanking scenarios – it's not like if you flanked one Nazi you've flanked them all. This is also what leads to the RTS-feeling I get (I almost want to mention some puzzle-game vibe, as well) – to succeed, you have to analyze the terrain, note cover, decide on positions to fire from and find a path to the unwary enemy's side. The game is often laid out in progressing “rooms.” Think NES Zelda or Chu Chu Rocket, kind of. You move in, take stock of the new surroundings, come up with a plan to defeat the configuration of the room and then execute it.

Really cementing the RTS likeness is the bird's-eye-view of the field you get when you press the Back button. The game pauses, the camera zooms out and you get to see what's what and who's where. Everything of interest in the vicinity is listed, from you to every squad on the field (yours and theirs) to objectives to tanks. As you scroll between these, the camera re-centers, and you can then raise and lower its angle or rotate it around the fieldpiece. You can't see everything everywhere, but it's very helpful in finding a flanking route or something to hide behind up ahead.

With the squads, field view and flanking all taken together, it's quite a tactical package. Of course, WWII tactics without WWII guns will still get you holepunched like last week's philosophy reading, and while I haven't really fired any old war weapons, these looked, sounded and felt plenty authentic to me. There are machine guns, rifles and pistols, and a couple varieties of each for both sides. There are also two explosive weapons (the Bazooka and the Panzerfaust) for taking down tanks. (Tanks are impervious to small arms fire, and can only be destroyed by other tanks, one of those two weapons or a “Press X to climb up on the back of this tank and toss a grenade into its dirty German hatch” attack.) You'll likely develop favorites, and pick those up when you see them. Unfortunately, the sniper rifle is only available at a few points in the game, but I  grew quite attached to a German machine gun that seemed as accurate as my US standard-issue rifle at making German helmets ping when they poke up from behind a wall or log. You can carry two guns at once, and switching out is done just like in Halo. Every dropped gun can be picked up, and stationary machine guns can be hopped into.

The game takes place as Baker's band of men moves across France, winding up in the town of Carentan. You'll flank Germans in small towns, warehouses, cities, fields, swamps, intersections, bridges ... pretty much any sort of place you can reasonably imagine existing in 1940s Normandy. Usually your mission is to get somewhere, but you'll sometimes be asked to blow up mortars or hold a position. One map has you destroying telephone poles that would surely be fatal to the American gliders trying to touch down in French farmland, while another places you atop a church with a sniper rifle and lets you gleefully pick off approaching soldiers. The fighting revolves around the landscape, which changes often enough to keep things interesting.

If you measure masterpieces in polygons, Gearbox hasn't created a masterpiece. Luckily, triangles aren't all that go into making a stunning-looking game. Ground textures often seem a little low-res, and 2D grass all up in your face gets annoying after a while, but damned if they haven't crammed a part of France onto a DVD. All of the geographical research put into the maps shines – the topography feels very real, and the layouts of the areas are always conducive to the gameplay but never forced. French houses in the countryside look like French houses in the countryside. Many of the unlockables show pictures side-by-side with screenshots, comparing actual maps and photos of the time with their representations in game. The attention to detail is astounding, and, in general, the graphical touches mirror the design. The colors in the game seem perfect, and Gearbox has created the most beautiful skies I've ever seen in a videogame. The lighting is expertly done: a cloudy day, instead of just being a darker version of a sunny day, feels like a cloudy day.

The boys at Gearbox figured the actual 101st Airborne didn't shoot bad guys to music, so neither should we. Background music only kicks in between stages and during loading (which happens for every level, and every time you die, which is alright because the loading screen's scrolling montage of scenes is fairly interesting). Instead of music, we get either nothing, playful inter-unit banter, firefight sounds or mortar/bomb explosions, depending on circumstances. The bomb and mortar booms begin to grate eventually, but that's all the more reason to leave the bombing area or take out the German artillery team. Though the phrases you'll hear in battle (“Hrunfrnnf auz bon die flankten,”[phonetically, anyway – the “flankten” obviously means you've been found out and are seen to be executing a flanking maneuver] is a favorite of the Germans) could use a bit more variety, the voice acting is well done.  Solid, solid, solid. 

All in all, the game has very few problems. From time to time, one of your soldiers may stand out in the open for no reason, or because he doesn't think he can fit behind the rock with everyone else, and will die within seconds of the start of a battle. Similarly, your men sometimes decide not to shift around a bit to get a shot at the enemy, and will yell lots of things like “I can't shoot what I can't see, Sarge!” until you reposition them. They handle themselves better behind low walls than hiding behind and poking around corners, and don't have the common sense to extrapolate the position of the next bomb impact from the line of five heading straight toward them. Likewise, enemies do very little when grenades land at their feet (they duck where they are, usually). The AI seems to be designed to handle the cover aspects of fighting, but nothing much fancier. Graphically, the same model for a typical “cover place” is used over and over. When you see the twelve-foot long dirt-hedge thing with lower dirt-hedge in the middle, you know what you're getting into because you've already gotten into it a dozen times. When it comes to movement, there's a little further frustration. You can hop over very few things, for example, even though the difference between hoppable and not-hoppable may only be a few inches ... in either direction. These all, interestingly, seem like issues common to RTS games, or at least stemming from an RTS-development mindset, which makes me wonder if the game were intitially going to be pushed further in that direction.

In addition to the stellar single player campaign, which probably took me around eight to ten hours for the first run (the game doesn't keep track, and I forgot to), it offers engaging multiplayer in the same vein (the same vein being, usually, something along the lines of getting to place X and holding it), supporting split screen, system link and Live. Split screen is limited to two players, each of whom has two squads to command, but system link and Live handle four players, presumably one controlling each unit. The campaign itself is worth playing through an extra time or two for the purpose of unlocking behind-the-scenes development peeks, historical information and (hooray!) cheats like infinite ammo and an old movie filter effect.

Overall: 8.5/10