“How many times have we played this game before?” smirked one office colleague, slinking into the games room one level into Brothers in Arms Hell’s Highway, presumably in search of a high-five or some kind of verbal reacharound for being so witty.
He took one glance at the screen, noted the squad of WWII-era paratroopers strapped into an olive-drab aircraft and said what the entire internet seems to believe. That is, apparently the fact that WWII shooters are still being developed constitutes some kind of epidemic. These are the same gamers who go apeshit over anything and everything with a space marine in it, mind, so their originality radars are a little off.
Unfortunately for Chuckles here, however, the answer to his question is none. Nobody has played a shooter like Hell’s Highway before. It’s that simple.
You’ve played similar shooters, sure. Rainbow Six Vegas is a good comparison – the cover mechanics are closely aligned. It also shares a lot in common with the first few Call of Duty titles, plus the latest Medal of Honor – naturally largely on account of the setting. But there’s something different about it. It’s grittier. It’s gorier. While other shooters seem to concern themselves with sanitising war for mass-market consumption, Gearbox has done the reverse. Hell’s Highway, as a result, pulls no punches. Allow us to explain.
There’s a large windmill ahead of us, which we venture into and scale the wooden stairs inside. There’s an open window towards the top that we peer out of with some binoculars. In the distance there are a few German sentries shuffling their feet beside a hedge, and there’s another dragging a screaming Dutch woman into a barn by her hair. Pressed into action we order our squad to advance, spring a makeshift attack on the barnyard and cautiously proceed to attempt a rescue. But we’re too late. The young Dutch woman, still dressed in what looks like a white nightgown, has been hanged from the rafters. She’s dead. Yeah. Welcome to Holland.
It gets even worse, too. Sniper rounds will turn a skull into a canoe, driving through the helmet leaving a trail of bone and brain confetti. Close-quarters firefights will see legs shot off at the knee, arms at the elbow and such – and explosions can rip a man in two. We don’t mention it to celebrate the violence, however, but to point out the eye-opening effect this level of brutality has on the overall experience. It’s so immersive you can’t help but feel moved. Comparing Hell’s Highway to a relatively tame shooter like Medal of Honor Airborne is like comparing Saving Private Ryan to, say, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. Or something. The gulf between them is vast.
