It's hard to get excited about another first-person shooter on the Xbox when there are already so many of them. It's even harder if that game turns out to be a World War II recreation since there are again so many in existence. Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30 hopes to grab your attention by putting you in the boots of a squad leader and letting you command your crew of up to 8 men in a sort of real-time strategy meets first-person shooter experiment. It will take a certain type of player to fully appreciate a game like this. If you are used to Halo or Unreal, this really may not be the game for you. Tactics used in those games will earn you a swift and brutal death here. However, if the idea of an unforgiving thinking man's shooter appeals to you, read on.

The game opens up with some outstanding scenes that you actually get to play though rather than watch. You're thrown right into the ultimate shit-storm of your squad's 8th day in the war. You have no idea what is going on, bombs are going off all over the place, your men are getting shot, and the game doesn't tell you what to do at all. It sounds confusing, but it's actually awesome. I personally chose to sit and pick off as many Nazis as I could until the game decided it was time to move on to the next scene, or rather, the beginning of the squad's journey into the war. You are brought back to the very beginning of your journey, as if flashing back to how you got into all this. Your character narrates the situation and does it in a very somber way which sets the mood perfectly. Next thing you know, you're looking out the door of a flying plane, ready to jump feet-first into hell. Anti-aircraft guns are blazing away on the ground and other paratroopers are slowly descending to their designated drop points. Planes and parachutes are all over the place. Some even catch a shell and erupt into flames. This scene in particular is very well done and is a prime example of how games are starting to show potential to rival Hollywood's biggest movie productions. It's not quite "Saving Private Ryan", but it has the right idea.

Too bad that the following scenes are where the game slows down. Way down. It grinds to a halt. Once you land, you go through a tutorial mode that introduces you to the basics of the game's controls and commands. While it is entirely necessary for a game like this, I can't help but think a separate tutorial set apart from the actual story mode would have been a better choice. You're on your own and have no idea where your men are, but the sense of fear is lost because you're stopping to learn how to crouch, jump, etc. You pretty much know you're not going to get discovered and shot by Nazis at this point. From here, it can take about 2 hours to get rolling again. The reason for this is that you take on some pretty easy missions right from the get-go. You only need to kill a few Nazis on each level and there's really only one correct path to take to do it. I can see a lot of people setting the game down during this time and not looking back. I was almost one of those people.

For those who stick with it, the rest of the game is a lot of fun. The levels start opening up and there are a few different ways to complete each one. You also start to learn about everyone in your squad. This takes a lot longer than I think the developers intended it to. I didn't fully remember each soldier's name and background until my 2nd time through. It also doesn't help that the few cut-scenes you get are mainly between you and your commanding officer. For a game that is based around becoming attached to your squadmates, you sure don't interact with them much outside of barking out orders to them. I think if Gearbox truly wanted to evoke emotion, throwing some longer cut-scenes in would have been the way to go. If you don't want to watch cut-scenes, fine, make them possible to skip. But if you really want me to care when one of my men goes down, show me who he is first. Call me crazy, but I think a half-hour of watching the men prepare for war together would have gone a long way. Show each one leaving their friends and family behind as they get on the bus for boot-camp. Show them reading letters from home. Give me a real reason to care about these guys. As it is, I'm just seeing videogame characters who occasionally have something mildly interesting to say. A game that wants so badly to recreate the World War II experience can only accomplish this by portraying it as the horrible thing that it really was and that includes more than just showing some realistic game violence.

So, without the character development, you have a very strategic shooter left on your hands. Thankfully, that part of the game is executed almost perfectly. Once you get past the initial hump, things can really get crazy. Your squad of two grows into a squad of 8, and you even get some tanks to order around. Best of all, the enemies get you seriously outnumbered and you really have to study the terrain to decide what the best strategy would be for the moment. You can do this by using the "situational awareness mode". This sort of pauses the game and lets you study where each team under you command is stationed, as well as every known enemy position in the area. This is where you can really start imagining different scenarios and begin to plan out moves like a good chess game.

So once you see the terrain from this point of view and get back into the action, you can use real military tactics to achieve your goals. Use one team to perform suppressing fire from the right, while another team runs to the left to flank the enemy. A circular meter even appears above the targeted enemy to tell you exactly how suppressed they are. As you suppress them more, their shots are less frequent, rushed, and a lot less accurate. Are the Nazis flanking you? Use one team to cover your front, one to cover your flank, and venture out by yourself to beat the Nazis to that critical bunker they so badly need to occupy. This is the kind of action that the game does better than any other World War II game. It's real and it's believable. Never before has one bunker mattered so much in the tide of a battle in a videogame. Best of all, the enemy can use your tactics right back against you. And of course, you can't really take too many hits. Oftentimes you just take one and it's game over. Luckily, Brothers In Arms has a really innovative way to keep you playing through those tough spots. If you die too many times, the game gives you the option to completely heal yourself and your team before starting up the last checkpoint again. It's completely optional too, so you hardcore players out there can suck it up and pass it without any help if you like.

Brothers In Arms is also a pretty good-looking game on the Xbox. It's not so much that the characters look great or that the clothing and gear is all historically accurate, because that does seem to be the case but, more so, that the environments are so convincing. You may look at a screenshot and think, "Hey, that just looks like an everyday field or valley", but that's the beauty of it. You can look around and see normal "everyday" stuff. Trees blowing in the wind, white picket fences with paint chipping off them, random puddles in the road after a rainstorm, etc. But it is a perfect representation of where this war was fought. It may not always be particularly interesting to look at, but it's not supposed to be. It's just supposed to be convincing and it does that with a great amount of success. When mortars start landing 20 feet from you and smoke drifts across the field because artillery is going off nearby, that is when it becomes interesting to look at. So far, I don't think we've seen a more impressive looking game in that respect. When a shell hits the ground, it doesn't just turn the grass black. The ground actually gets a crater in it and chunks of soil fly into the air. If you're close enough, there can even be small bits of dirt landing on your screen as if your face should be covered in it. Nice touches like this can really sell the experience.

When things get crazy in this game, it looks fantastic and sounds even better. You'll hear your soldiers calling out from time to time as well as the enemy soldiers yelling at each other in their native tongue. There's only a few lines that they yell out, but it sounds great and a chorus of bullets slamming into your surroundings are the icing on the cake. Throw in some explosions and you've got a symphony of destruction on your hands. My favorite use of sounds is when a mortar or grenade goes off in your immediate vicinity. You are momentarily knocked out, but when you come around, you ears ring and everything sounds distant. Moments later it all comes back at full volume and clarity but its definitely a nice trick that adds to the sense of realism.

Multiplayer is included and allows up to 4 players to battle it out over system link or Xbox Live. Two people can play split-screen as well. Players get to play as Americans or Germans and take part in the usual games of capture the flag or assault. They're not called CTF or assault though. Instead, they are "capture the documents" or "defend the hill" etc. It is really not too different from every other FPS multiplayer game out there until you consider the AI bots that each player gets to command. Like the single-player game, you get a squad of 4 men per player (8 if there are only 2 players) and you can position them wherever you like and give them a certain set of orders to help aid you in that quest to keep the enemy away from the objective. All the rules of single-player still apply in this mode as well. You get the suppression meter as well as situational awareness mode. You'll have to be quicker with it this time however, as the game is no longer paused while you scout the terrain. You really have to be focused here or it can be real easy for an enemy with a smart gameplan to catch you napping.

Despite the innovative idea of letting each player command a squad or two, the multiplayer is just not as fleshed out as it needed to be to really grab me. I found the single-player campaign to be much more interesting because the story helped to add importance to everything going on. Multiplayer is a fun little diversion, but it does not have the staying power to keep you playing for months on end like Rainbow Six 3 or Splinter Cell.

To sum up, Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30 is a fun game that is hampered by shortcomings that could ruin the game for people with low patience. If you like first-person shooters, look into it. It is a fantastic entry into the World War II category. I could easily recommend this to anyone who enjoyed Full Spectrum Warrior. Anyone looking for a riveting story won't find it here, but there are plenty of memorable moments in the gameplay to make up for it.