Goatmoose

Since I didn’t get to spend my free time today playing The Pitt, I played Brothers in Arms. Last weekend, I went through Call of Duty: WaW, so it’s been quite the past few days of shooting Nazis, chucking stick grenades and flaming Japanese banzais out of trees.

These two games have so much in common. First, they’re both set in World War II and are first person shooters. Oh… actually, that’s it.

Call of Duty: WaW is a strong title in the Call of Duty lineup. That somewhat goes without saying, as there’s never really been a bad CoD. This game returns to WWII, where all Call games aside from #4 took place.

WaW is literally war. There are often an amazing number of things happening on your screen at any given time. Lots of war games throughout the years have you basically taking down the Nazi regime single-handedly (what, Medal of Honor?). In WaW, it is not uncommon for there to be 30 guys on screen at once, 10 being Americans and 20 being Germans, accompanied by three tanks, a truck and a bunch of smoke grenades. You may go up against enemies with pistols, rifles, RPGs and snipers at the same time, all while the sky explodes with AA fire in the distance and the scenery around you reacts to what’s going on. It’s definitely an intense game with a decent story and lots of fun things to do along the way.

As with all CoD titles, there is incentive to play through multiple times. And yeah, Veteran mode is still hard as balls and seemingly impossible at times. Like Call of Duty 4, this game has you playing as several different characters throughout the story. Interestingly, for many of them you play as a Russian soldier fighting against the Germans. A few moments seem stolen right out of Enemy at the Gates, especially a sniper level, and you are required to make Vassili Zaitsev (or at least Jude Law) proud. You’ve got a wild arsenal of weapons, a tank mission, some flamethrower missions, and that great game process variety that continues to give the series life. There are 16 missions, which sounds like a lot, but many of them are quite short. My first playthrough was on standard difficulty, and I whooped the game somewhere between 4-5 hours.

Admittedly, I still enjoy Call of Duty 4 the best out of the series – both on the back of its awesome gameplay that isn’t quite topped by this title, and well, the tools of modern warfare are just more fun. I’ll take satellite targeting missiles over an M1 Garand any day. But WaW is pretty slick, no doubt.

So how about Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway – and for that matter, how about games with long ass titles and colons in them? So rad, for rizz.

Brothers in Arms is like Brothers Snuggled In Each Others Arms As They Sleep compared to World at War. It’s the complete opposite of the other title. Still a FPS, still WWII, but holy mummified heaven on a lampshade this is a slow game.

Check out the still I bummed from IGN (right). First off, this game’s play style is way different from Call of Duty. You’re almost never alone – at least you’re not supposed to be, unless you’re a terrible leader and send all your men out to die. You generally have with you an assault team that you can position, control, tell where/who to attack, when to run, when to stay, etc. Sometimes they are also accompanied by a bazooka team (yay!) or some other tactical team. In all reality, you need these fellows to stay alive if you don’t want to spend ten years going through every mission. The graphics aren’t quite as good, nor is the sound, some of the character models are downright poop, and you can taste from those two stills above how the general graphics stack up – but what about the GAMEPLAY?

The play is like “world war, but don’t tell anyone.” By that, I mean that every-damn-person-hides. Including you and your boys. You get into a room, and a crapload of Germans hide behind stuff. You hide behind something. You pop up, fire off a shot or two, and have to go back to cover or you’re dead. Repeat. Repeat. Send your dudes to a location, have them do the same. Repeat. All the Germans are dead. Next room. Germans run out, they all hide. You hide. Pop up, shoot, cover. Repeat. Get it? Sometimes it feels like Nazi Whack-A-Mole as you constantly hide and try to pop off single shots at their little German helmets for hours on end. This also keeps the gameplay uber slow, and sometimes (often) downright boring. Especially since you’re basically using the same few guns for the entire game. It’s certainly easier, and longer, if you have the patience for it.

The game opens and moves between levels with obsessively long cutscenes. The one in the beginning was something like 7 minutes. This would be alright if they were cool, but they’re not. They’re boring as all the fire of a thousand suns. Opposite the WaW constant action method, these scenes are more Band of Brothers, with guys chumming around, slapping hands and talking about garbage. But Lord…

But you may love all this better than constant attack.

It just goes to show that genres are expansive. We only have so many words to describe a game. FPS games are so common now that the term defines nothing alone. But even a niche of FPS like WWII games can hold drastic differences between titles. I say play them all, and figure out which ones fit your gaming style best. Who am I to say what’s wrong and what’s reich?