Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood Review

A mere seven months after Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, Ubisoft and developer Gearbox are back for more. As you can probably guess by to the quick turn around time, Earned in Blood is a heck of a lot like Road to Hill 30 in pretty much every aspect. The novelty of the experience has worn off, however, and the flaws with the gameplay are more readily apparent this time around. It is still a good game that is worth playing, but it isn’t going to floor you like the first game did.

Story

The main attraction in the Brothers in Arms games is the cinematic presentation and dramatic storytelling style. You are thrown right smack dab into the middle of a battlefield with people dying all around you, bullets whizzing past your head, and explosions ripping through your friends and it is downright scary. War is hell and Brothers in Arms depicts it in an incredibly emotional and realistic way that no other game even comes close to touching. This causes you to get extremely attached to your character as well as the other men in your squad and it is this bond that makes Brothers in Arms such an incredible experience.

In Earned in Blood, you play as an American corporal named Joe “Red” Hartsock. The story and missions are based on what really happened to the real Joe Hartsock as he and his squad fought through the French countryside in the two weeks following the D-Day invasion. The story is top notch and incredibly well presented.

Gameplay

Earned in Blood is a first-person-shooter with added tactical aspects. The FPS fundamentals – shooting, tossing grenades, using melee attacks - are very solid here. It is much slower paced than most other FPS games on the Xbox, though, and direct attacks usually result in death. You instead have to rely on cover and using suppressing fire to pin the enemy down behind their own cover so you can flank them and take them out. You can order your team to suppress and assault and move to positions you dictate, but for the most part they are smart enough to figure things out on their own and aren’t going to do stupid things that get them killed.

Because you and the enemy are both constantly running to available cover, the game falls into a pattern of finding the enemy and suppressing them so you can flank them only to have them find new cover where the whole pattern starts over again. The levels are fairly linear so you just go from set piece to set piece and it all becomes pretty repetitive after a while. The storyline and amazing presentation will keep you playing, but the gameplay leaves quite a bit to be desired.

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