Leggett also struggles massively with survivor guilt before his own death during the team’s climactic defence of Carentan, but it’s the suicidal nature of Leggett’s final moments that haunts Baker in ways not fully explored until the third core entry, Hell’s Highway. Squad tensions run high in the aftermath as everyone turns on sole-survivor Leggett, though Baker only blames himself for not being there to stop it. With his friend gone, Baker takes a moment to breathe and considers what he’d say to Risner’s family when he gets home, reflecting on the hole left in his life.īaker’s mental state only worsens as more men fall, but no more so than after Allen and Garnett perish off-screen during a recon mission with Leggett. These monologues do not merely serve as exposition but instead help Baker and his team feel like real people - real people whose relationships (despite some retrospectively-hammy voice acting) take centre stage as they banter and argue in rare moments of calm, and scream at each other when hell breaks loose.Īnd so, when some die in Road to Hill 30’s big story moments, it means more than in other war games.īaker's first loss, for example, is his home-town best friend - a tank driver called George Risner who dies in the push to St. We also hear Baker trying to rationalise the things that happen to these characters during their first operation, and how his mental state unravels when feeling out of control. We learn about incidental interactions with his men, like the peculiar way Kevin Leggett eats his eggs or how Joe ‘Red’ Hartsock proudly tells anyone who’ll listen about the pre-war bar fight that left his face scarred. We learn about the things that helped shape him as a leader though anecdotes of fatherly advice and other childhood memories. In Road to Hill 30, you play as Sergeant Matt Baker (voiced by pre-fame namesake, Troy) who, as the intro explains, has leadership thrust upon him shortly after landing in Normandy.ĭuring the inner monologues that head each mission, you hear from Baker how uncomfortable it makes him, how he laments having the lives of thirteen men and their families hanging on his every decision. Road to Hill 30 took WWII shooters in a different direction. This meant that while genre-mates flew you around the world during their campaigns, Road to Hill 30 took place only in Normandy as part of ‘Operation Chicago’, and its green fields, country roads and rural towns gave the plot some intimacy. Its ‘Brothers in Arms’ moniker was a reflection of a story that closely followed a small group of soldiers immediately before and after D-Day. Put simply: they were era-standard shooters in WW2 skins and why, even now, I only vividly remember those beach landings and barely anything else.īrothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 - inspired by Band of Brothers in particular - seemed to hint at something more and, when it was released in March 2005, I was not disappointed. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and its console counterpart, Frontlines, had both replicated Saving Private Ryan’s shocking opening in enjoyably chaotic ways, but neither had any of its wider themes, happy to settle into standard FPS tropes. I don’t think I was alone but they kickstarted my desire to learn more about WW2 and that, such is the obsessive way I’m wired, fed into my gaming time.īut, try as they might, video games could only capture the surface-level brutality of war but said nothing about it. Though one was a fictional story and the other a dramatisation of the real 101st Airborne that dropped into Nazi-occupied France before D-Day, both were incredible looks at WW2 and the people that served in it. Firstly, in 2004, video games were in full swing of aping Spielberg’s 1998 WW2 classic Saving Private Ryan and the terrific 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers. Using Antal’s military background, Gearbox put a lot of stock into historical, geographical and tactical accuracy. The video featured Pitchford and Gearbox’s then-military advisor, Colonel John Antal, showing off what made their World War II shooter series so different. Indeed, it was Pitchford’s passion that drew my attention to the Brothers in Arms series in 2004, when I stumbled on pre-release footage of the series’ first game, Road to Hill 30, while looking for info about Ghost Recon 2 on Ubisoft’s website.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |