Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway

Gearbox Software

This review was originally posted to Twitter in 2020 and reposted to Medium in 2025. 

h/t MobyGames for screenshots (except the third, which is mine)

The psychological effects of war have gone through a lot of names: shell shock, combat fatigue, and the clinical-sounding “post-traumatic stress disorder.” But up until recent years, it was rarely a feature of war games. Who wants to play a game where you’re so rattled by constant shelling you can’t even blink? Gearbox thought differently though. They’d already seen what they had wrought with the first two Brothers in Arms games and realized that there was room to take things even deeper into darkness, years before Spec Ops: The Line. Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway is thus perhaps a truer sequel than Earned in Blood in that it’s a significant leap forward in terms of graphics and to a lesser extent gameplay, but it’s also a major jump ahead in the ongoing storyline of Sgt. Baker and his deepening trauma in the face of war.

Hell’s Highway is about trauma, and how that trauma shapes us, shapes our relationships.

Baker’s problem is that he gets too attached to the men under his command. Each one’s death hits him hard, each one’s death is like a stone on his back, weighing him down and digging into his skin. The worst ones would have to be the deaths of Leggett, Allen and Garnet. Key scenes from the first game, Road to Hill 30, play an important role in the plot of Hell’s Highway, namely how they shape Baker’s trauma — and, especially, the awful truth at the core of these men’s deaths, the one that Baker had been keeping to himself all this time. To that end the game actually plays at being a psychological horror game from time to time. Aside from flashes of the corpses of Baker’s dead men, or a dead child who Baker had tried to save, he also just straight up starts seeing things that aren’t there.

A lengthy sequence in an abandoned hospital makes for most of the game’s spooks, everything feeling otherworldly and unsettling amidst the night-time bombing of Eindhoven during the tail end of the failed Operation Market Garden.

Of course, the game is still the Brothers in Arms we know and mostly love, with some important tweaks. The core gameplay loop remains the same: suppress, flank and overrun the enemy, using the squads available to you. But overall the game just feels smoother than its predecessors. While you’re still expected to not treat the game like Call of Duty, the game doesn’t typically drop you into impossible situations like the previous two, and it sometimes changes things up with lengthy solo sequences.

You’re also given access to more powerful squads — sometimes they have a bazooka or a .30 caliber machine gun, both of which make suppressing the enemy a snap — or blowing them up, as the case may be. The AI has been tightened up a bit, so they no longer take cover on the wrong side of a wall. Perhaps the biggest change has been how the game handles health, both yours and your squad’s. In keeping with the times, you now have regenerating health, though it’s been reframed as “threat” — the longer you’re out of cover the more likely you’re going to get hit. This actually plays into one of Baker’s hallucinations late in the game as the scene of a grim defense of a train station against a horde of German tanks and troops slowly gets redder and redder, giving the fiery nighttime battle a hellish tint. Your squadmates’ health has also been tweaked, in that if one is incapacitated, it’s only until the next checkpoint, at which point he picks himself up and rejoins the squad. (Note: I played on easy, so I don’t know how this works in harder difficulties.)

Perhaps the only real step down from the previous games is that the situational awareness mode is no longer a fancy bird’s eye view of the battlefield but is now reduced to a 2D map, which doesn’t give you as much information to work with.

This series is probably the closest we’re going to get to a video game adaptation of Band of Brothers, with its episodic structure and tragic tone, and an emphasis on character drama over spectacle. and Hell’s Highway is perhaps the best one yet in that regard. The game looks fantastic, the gameplay tweaks are very welcome (especially after Earned in Blood’s frustrating difficulty,) and it brings some of the best acting in the WW2 shooter genre up to that point. It’s a perfect blend of strategy, FPS action and drama in a way I’ve not seen elsewhere.

Sadly the series kind of stopped dead here. With the arrival of the Borderlands series, Gearbox kind of drifted from its humble roots in making serious games and leaned into its new personality as the “wacky” AAA studio with an ill-fated comedic reboot of Brothers in Arms. The announcement of Furious 4 didn’t really make a lot of people happy, and the game was quietly canceled. It’s been seventeen years since the last Brothers in Arms game, and we’ve yet to hear any concrete information about a sequel, though rumors are flying that one is coming.

Whether or not we get that long-awaited Battle of the Bulge-themed Brothers in Arms sequel, we can at least rest assured that amidst the last days of the World War II shooter’s heyday in the 2000s, Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway remains an object lesson in how to stand out from the crowd in its own subtle way.

 

-june❤