Highway through hell sure is bloody, but it isn’t bad
Fact- I hate World War II games.
Fact for this game- I loved this game.
Fact- I hate Unreal Engine 3 graphics.
Fact for this game- I loved its graphics.
The two above listed facts are huge problems for me. I absolutely hate WW II games and UE3. This game has both of these as its basis, but I loved it still. Its saying a lot, and it’s because of the wonderful blend of traditional ingredients of game- a great emotional story, a engaging gameplay and striking graphics.
Still following Sgt. Matt baker, the game is a recreation of Operation market garden of WW II, where allied forces were dropped behind enemy lines in The Netherlands to secure multiple bridges. It isn’t story about how the war ended, but its story of one man, Sgt. Baker, of how he lost his man in the bloodbath and how he handled it.
Graphics-
Probably the first thing you would notice about the game. If you have played Unreal Engine 3.0 in a few games before and know how the engine looks, you would be absolutely dazzled by the wide open and colorful environments here. The lighting is amazing and colors are vivid. UE3 is infamous for aliasing, but there is very little of it to be found here. It runs well too, and on my modest machine I got 60FPS average. Some reviewers said something about 2-D grass. I didn’t get the term. Granted that the grass doesn’t move when we move through, but then there is no game other than Crysis where it does. This grass is probably the best grass I have seen, barring Crysis of course.
And ah, the rain effects! This game has the best in-game rain I have ever seen. Screenshots wont do justice, you just have to see the rain while playing the game to see how atmospheric it is.
9/10
Gameplay- Consider it as a hybrid of Rainbow six: Vegas, Call of Duty and Company of heroes. It takes the cover system and buddy controlling schemes of Vegas, imagery of Call of Duty and strategic techniques of Company of heroes (on a much smaller level though). So basically, it takes good points of three awesome games and mixes them up to make something great. Not to say that its better than any of these games, cause it does feel repetitive sometimes. But its great nonetheless.
The cover system is made very very necessary. If you don’t use it, you would be toast. Although this same thing stems this problem that because of this, sometimes the buddies seem useless. It feels that even if they weren’t there, we single handedly could have finished the game. And this becomes more evident when we begin to notice that our AI buddies don’t kill most of the time. Almost all of the time, it was me who killed enemies, AI suppresses them at most.
Also, the cover system is wonky a bit of times. It happened numerous times that I was unable to take cover to something from which I just took a moment ago. Because of this, I died in same spot three times.
8.75/10
Presentation/AI/Sound- The story takes the cake here. It’s not grand as Saving Private Ryan and its also not about how WW II was won. It’s just about a guy and his boys. How they go through hell, loose friends and cope with it. The end, although kind of a cliffhanger, is wonderful and will leave you pumped up for a sequel.
The music is A-grade. You would feel this right from the start when the intro menu will be backed up by emotionally charging music. The sound effects are really great. I hate those games which don’t support surround sound properly, but this isn’t one of them. Even though my Sound blaster live 5.1 is an old card, I was able to get proper surround sound with awesome effects. These effects are really noticeable when your buddies move or talk behind you.
AI is decent. Its not great (I actually am starting to realize that I am saying this for every other game. No games I reviewed had very bad AI and neither of them had very good one either). If I could say one line about it, I would say- “it gets the job done”.
8.5/10
Final words-
It’s amazing to where Gearbox have come from their modest start as a modding team. This game does not fills fresh air in the lungs of a dying sub-genre called WW II games, and rightfully so cause there is no need of that as this genre had its run and it should be allowed to die a respectful death (but subpar games like Hour of victory won’t let it do so will they?), but it does make it proud. There will be a sequel and I would be there to play it, but if this was the swan song of WW II games, they couldn’t have asked for a better one.
8.75/10.
