Brothers in Arms gameplay preview

I managed to pull myself away from Star Wars Galaxies to view the E3 gameplay presentation for Brothers in Arms. Like seeing friends fall into the bottomless chasms of other MMORPGs, you never think it can happen to you. But Galaxies has me securely, and is currently the reason I game on my PC. But I'll get to that affliction another day.

I stand by my assessment of Call of Duty, however improvements can easily be made in the game's sense of character. There was certainly an identifiable squad in each of the game's campaigns, but as far as characterization, most of the men that fought with you were disposable, and at times irrelevant when combat sequences required you to move ahead and fight alone. Brothers in Arms appears to address this shortcoming by allowing the player to issue heat of battle commands with a very simple context-sensitive interface. You can tell your Fire team to move to a position and set up a base of fire. In the same manner you can command your Assault team to move in for the kill. What's even more interesting is what Gearbox refers to as the "Situational Awareness View", an isometric overhead map that displays what is going on in the battle. Using this map you can see enemy positions and what they are doing, and icons showing their disposition towards the battle - that is, whether they are pinned down, on the assault or merely defending a rally point.

Because there isn't much scripting involved in your squad's tactics, some of your field commands may end up getting your men killed. In the gameplay video, you see the Fire team get mercilessly cut down by a German soldier hiding out on the top floor of a house in an MG42 emplacement. It would be more realistic if the AI was smart enough to take these situations into account, because as it stands a case like that would require your intervention. The enemy AI seemed adaptive - they would adjust their positions as each team closed in.

When a man falls in the midst of a firefight, a squad member shouts that he's down and wounded. The momentum of battle continues, and then you hear the same soldier say that he didn't make it; the wounds were fatal. Humanizing the characters like this will make combat harder to take, and instead of rushing your squad members straight into the fray, you might actually think about it first. I'm not certain this type of gameplay would be suited to those that are used to the typical "run and gun" methods, but I'm sure it would still work. I just think the experience would be less enjoyable.

The graphics engine makes me wonder what I was looking at in Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. All environments are modelled after real-life battlefields and locations, right down to the placement of stone walls and buildings. The eyes of squad mates follow your movement, and facial and body language are modelled as well. Adding to the realism, to be sure, but creepy nonetheless.

For fourteen minutes I was genuinely transfixed. Clearly some valuable design modifications have been made to the standard FPS. United with the game's dedication to a realistic World War II frontline combat experience, I foresee the same reaction to Call of Duty last year.

While in the same state of mind, I read that Axis and Allies would enter the realm of real time strategy with a new game being developed by Timegate Studios. They're the same team that brought us the absolutely stunning Kohan series. I've seen some screens of this incarnation of the beloved boardgame, which predictably follow the trend of taking RTS to three dimensions. I remain largely unimpressed, as it all seems a little too familiar.

Axis and Allies is easily my favorite board game of all time. Looking back there was clearly an age where I graduated from the manic dice rolling of Risk and moved into the territory of high tabletop strategy. Timegate has proven their clout in giving the RTS genre a badly needed injection of originality, but something tells me that a game involving the movement of armies over land, sea and air of entire contintents needs something on larger scale. Why should battle be limited to a single map? Perhaps some ideas can be borrowed from Rise of Nations or Medieval: Total War, where a larger world map allows the movement of troops and materials to war-ravaged countries, and the actual fighting takes place in individual maps. I can't say that I'm looking forward to this game, because it seems to me that Iron Blitz is just as good a representation of the game as any. Once again I feel that a powerful brand is being abused, where no meddling is required.

caught in the maelstrom