As a guy who has been gaming for most of his life, I have come across a lot of games that have unique concepts and gimmicks that are meant to hook the player in and provide a unique experience. The concept that Hell’s Highway puts across is a heavily squad based World War 2 experience, played through the eyes of series hero Matt Baker. As in the other games of the series, the squad mechanics not only provide a unique game play experience in the WW2 FPS genre but they assist the story driven experience by attempting to make you feel much closer to your AI counterparts. The series has made its mark by giving you a Band of Brothers style experience. What they do is they throw a bunch of characters into 3 man squads and try to make you feel connected to them by providing plenty of story driven cut scenes. While the idea is great and Hell’s Highway is full of a lot of great ideas, it fails to pull some of them off.

Hells Highway controls like a normal FPS and one of the best parts about this game is how simple and intuitive the squad command and cover options work: one button to take cover behind every object you would expect to be able to take cover behind. The squad commands are just as simple and work just as well, use the D-pad to select the squad you want to issue an order to and aim with your crosshair at where or what you want them to target; point and click. Every German in this game from the moment they spawn in on the map, no matter how far away they might be, will have a red dot above their head to tell you where they are, this dot will only change color to gray when they’re being suppressed. This annoyed me to no end. I like it when games like Call of Duty thrust upon you a sense of urgency by having enemies attack you from around a corner, which forces you to take cover or get shot-up. Getting your squad to suppress the Germans is quite simple and quite effective, just select a squad and click on one of these annoying red dots and you will pretty much be free to move to new cover. The only issues I had with this control scheme were purely technical; your character will occasionally pop in and out of cover, and your squad, while behind cover, will sometimes ignore the objective they were meant to destroy simply because they were facing the wrong direction.

The combat in this game is almost as simple as the control scheme, for better and for worse. In most scenarios I found myself following a step-by-step system, suppress, flank, kill and move up. One thing I found really funny when I would flank a German machine gun nest, is that they would start standing up and getting shot by suppressive fire from my allies when they saw me. The squad combat is by far the best part in this game but they mess this up by having sections of the game where you are separated from your squad in order to clear a building, rescue an ally or search the buildings for alternate exits. These sections of game play really slow down the combat, your usually only faced with 2-3 Germans while you’re alone but the game play is the same as it is when you have your squad. You die fast and have to take cover, the problem here is that the Germans will take cover too, and you find yourself playing sequences of combat reminiscent of Whack-a-Mole. The only other combat in this game is when you get the ability to be a tank driver. As the tank driver you get a real sense of power, if you’re quick with your machine gunner and your cannon you will have no problem progressing through these missions but if you’re not careful you will be blown up by Panzers or anti-tank squads. The gore camera is also pretty cool: get that nice headshot or a good explosion and you are rewarded with a slow motion shot of a limb falling off or a face exploding.

The levels in general seem huge and usually have 2-3 options for progressing towards the enemy; the best way for me to describe it is by saying it’s a linear path inside a non-linear level. The problem is that none of the buildings are accessible unless they’re part of your objective, glass doesn’t break and alley ways will be blocked off by small objects with invisible walls behind them. While the levels are big enough that you won’t notice this most of the time, if you ever get confused about your objective and think maybe it’s down that path only to realize you can’t go any further, it really manages to take you out of the experience. On the upside, you will be taken through many beautiful fields, farms and villages that all manage to capture the WW2 feel; the environments all manage to add to the combat taking place in them. The combat and your objectives may get repetitive, but this is one of the few games that give you a change up because of the locale. You might always be fighting the same enemies with the same weapons, but as an example of the change up, you could be running from building to building in tight quarters trying to get to that 88 or you could be assaulting a barn from uphill with machine gun fire raining down overhead.

The story is one of the things that was very hyped-up for this game and I have to say I enjoyed it. The problem with it however, is that it feels like you’re watching a movie in between levels of a game instead of a part of the game. Nothing in game felt like part of the storyline they were trying to create but instead felt like a way for them to move from place to place. Imagine there was a Saving Private Ryan game: great movie but what if this movie could only be experienced by playing the characters and moving them to the next location so you could watch the next 10 minutes of the movie? Another thing that bothered me was that all the characters in the storyline are part of your squad but if they die as a part of your squad during combat there is no consequence and they will simply re-spawn in level when you get to the next checkpoint.

The audio is simply fantastic in this game, you get great orchestral themes that really set the mood for the story and you get all the chilling sounds of combat that you could imagine. The voice actors took their roles pretty seriously and these are people that don’t get enough credit I find for really drawing people in the game because a bad voice actor can quickly take you out of it. There graphics are pretty good in this game but there are some weird animation choices and texture pop-ins that happen quite frequently. The multiplayer had a great concept, 10 vs 10 matches that choose one for each team to command the other nine in there squads. The big problem here is that there is not much of a community and there are a lot of lag and texture issues.

All in all I found Hells Highway to be a good game; it was a nice change up in the WW2 FPS genre because of the squad combat system. The game was hyped-up to be a AAA title and I was pretty excited for it but it kind of left me disappointed because of how long I waited and how many issues the game still had. I enjoyed the story but felt there wasn’t enough in-game material to make me feel a part of it. Hell’s Highway is a good game and I’m grateful for it because of the time of year it came out, about a month before the holiday hits start coming out. If it had come out later in the year it would have most likely been trampled by the competition and quickly forgotten. I’d like to see this series continue however with a new storyline, and if you’re going to be so focused on story, be sure to have the player be a part of it.

By Evan Doran