Hell's Highway (2002)

My rating: 5/10

When I first published a video with the title, "Morbid Curiosity" it was described as, "Morbid Curiosity will be a inconsistent series of visiting older titles I have always been drawn to despite no commercial or critical acclaim." The first, and only, video published underneath that title was GRIN's final gasping release Bionic Commando (2009), but the idea behind the series has remained on my mind long before and after that date. Edwin Evans-Thirwell in his review of Wanted: Dead, makes several mentions of the bygone era of "double-a" games,

...basically, games from the dawn of the broadband era, before Naughty Dog and Ubisoft forced every third-person rival to learn parkour and court comparison with HBO, before the ubiquity of Steam and the death of trade-ins, before every game had to involve a loot treadmill and a season pass. This was a time when mid-tier 3D action experiences in particular were free to be raw, brutish, unpolished, shamelessly smashed-together and, very often, an absolute bunch of arse, because there were fewer settled notions about what any videogame should do.

For Edwin this curiosity for games released around 2004 is something I have for games around the 2008 period. The "HD" generation whose titles were, a majority of the time, hitting 720p, 30fps. It was the generation that saw the "death" of the licensed movie tie-in game and of double-A retail releases. It was this generation I am most interested in with its releases of games such as Alice: Madness Returns, Wolfenstein (2009), WET, Afro Samurai, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Bionic Commando, Homefront, Singularity, Medal of Honor (2010), Dead to Rights Retribution, The Saboteur, and Frontlines: Fuels of War to name but a few that I own due to this curiosity.

Some of these games have received acknowledgement in our contemporary times, but others have been all but forgotten save for the few fans who will chime in whenever a new YouTube video covering it is released.

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway was the third mainline entry in a burgeoning franchise underneath Ubisoft and Gearbox that has been long abandoned despite this game's "To Be Continued" that graces the black screen upon completion (and despite Pitchford's claims of another entry being in development). With Hell's Highway I don't think we have a game deserving a critical reevaluation, but instead is a game that, "craves to be understood and acknowledged, if not celebrated."

Two components of Hell's Highway that were crafted by the developers and recognized by most reviewers that separate this game from others of its ilk are: 1.) "emotional" story/storytelling, Band of Brothers-like focus on individuals during wartime, and 2.) "tactical" squad controlling gameplay that de-emphasizes the player as an unstoppable individual. Despite appreciating specific aspects of both, neither truly stay true to its intent.

One of the major hurdles in finding its characters interactions and the internal conflict of our main character, Staff Sergeant Matt Baker, is that the voicework is standard VO work but the facial animations are lacking entirely. Frequently the voices and their emotion, ranging from voice-breaking grief to rageful yelling, is undercut by faces that are just not capable of displaying the proper range and nuance to match the emotion being performed in the audio. Stunted plotlines also undercut intended effects. A sniper is mentioned as having killed a fellow soldier in the past only to be encountered and executed in the following level. A new recruit kisses a Dutch woman and later that night has the obsessive need to run into the bombed out city to "save" her, only to lead to both of their death's. His earlier comforting of a dying priest mid-firefight has the appearance of setting up this compulsive need, but you don't get sufficient time to invest emotionally in him as a person leading to his insubordination and ultimate fate not hitting the emotional target aimed for. It also doesn't help that it took me quite some time, and some reading on prior entries, to begin to learn who was who among the many similar faces of the cast.

Baker's internal conflict revolves around guilt of the death of a Private Kevin Legett, who was responsible for the death of two squadmates and subsequently ordered by Baker to keep it a secret lest he be executed by fellow soldiers. Legett ultimately died during a previous engagement and Baker keeps his guilt, and the secret source of that guilt, bottled up within him for a majority of the game. Legett will frequently appear in flashes, pairs of glasses found will summon his image, and he even begins to appear to Baker, first as a corpse, and finally as a sort of Tyler Durden-esque projection, complete with a POV switch to another soldier watching Baker seemingly talking to himself in the distance. This haunting made sense up until the point of Baker's admission of the truth to his squad, as even after he opens up Legett's haunting continues. It may be commentary on Baker's guilt being carried forward, despite his honesty and throwing away the "cursed" silver pistol that served as an anchor point, but we will likely never know considering a follow up never happened.

Hell's Highway has a heavy emphasis on controlling squads of fellow soldiers to suppress and flank enemy squads. Your machine gun squad can lay down long stretches of suppressing fire, your bazooka squad can destroy MG nests and destructible cover, and your assault squad can throw a grenade when close enough. While this is presented as a cooperative campaign of soldiers rather than something like Call of Duty where your lone player character performs every key action and achieves more kills than every other soldier combined, Hell's Highway still devolves into your player character racking up the highest kill count out of the whole regiment. This is due to the allied AI never really achieving much without your direct intervention. Leave them behind cover to do their thing and they'll trade bullets with nary a casualty for either side all day. Flanking maneuvers frequently require you to be in the optimal position before rallying the chosen squad to take up a position alongside you, by which point you will have already gunned down the enemy.

A few missions even push you into solo excursions anyway, abandoning entirely the squad-based mechanics. Despite this, I still appreciated some key points of the gameplay, namely: you do not rack up hundreds of bullets and shrug them off via a regenerating health system. Instead, your screen becomes increasingly red the longer you remain exposed, thereby giving the enemy more of a chance to finally achieve a hit and your death. I also liked the inaccuracy of guns, relative to other shooters. Too frequently online gamers will cry out for "authentic" recreations but god forbid this be reflected in weapons not always hitting where you're aiming. While the first person aim-down-sights retains this pinpoint accuracy expectation, a majority of the time you will be engaged in cover, bringing the camera to third person perspective and your aiming reticule will need some time to get smaller as you take aim to try and hit your target.

Hell’s Highway (1932) Rowland Brown