Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood (PC) Review

BIA:EIB – Worth a purchase?

The answer to that question will be totally up to you. I’ll try andgive you my thoughts and perspective and then let you make the finaldecision.

Gearbox has done a fantastic job with Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood. This installment and its predecessor are both themostrealistic WWII FPS games I’ve ever played and I’m sure most peoplewould agree to that as well. The good and bad of BIA:EIB is that notmuch in the way of content has changed from the first version. It’s adouble edged sword. People that didn’t play Brothers In Arms: Road toHill 30 (not sure why on earth you didn’t) won’t really miss anythingby jumping right into Earned in Blood. EIB gives a differentperspective through our now main character ‘Red’. With that said, thoseof us looking for something different in EIB most likely will walk awaya bit unsatisfied.

It is still a great game to play and when you start looking throughthe extras and see all the effort that Gearbox put into researching andmaking this game, you can really appreciate the final product. I’llhave to forewarn you now. The negative things I did find were sominute, that they didn’t affect my overall enjoyment of the game.They’re still worth a mention however to be fair.

Game Play/Controls:
In BIA:EIB it’s not just your ass you have to watch, you havedifferent teams that you have to look out for and ensure they’resurvival. Controlling ‘Red’ is done with the standard W,A,S,D keys withthe assistance of the mouse to look around.

Moving your teams is sweetly simplistic. It’s a simple right clickof the mouse, move the cursor where you want them to go and then afinal right/left click depending on what you want them to do. You canalso order them to fall back or form up on you. They’re by no meansbrain dead robots that only do what you tell them to do. They’llquickly take cover while under fire and without hesitation let you knowif they’re incapable of doing something or moving to an area you wishthem to go to.

I played through the entire game on difficult just so I couldunlock the authentic mode. I’m not sure what the philosophy is behindmaking the authentic mode un-lockable. It should be available rightfrom the start so I could choose to play in that mode if I saw fit.During the authentic mode there were no tell-tale suppressionindicators. That little detail right there, made the game muchmore realistic. The only indicator as to the enemies position was themuzzle flash from their barrels while they opened fire on me. PlayingEIB on difficult is well…difficult. Authentic is just that much more ofa challenge. I didn’t complete the entire game again on authentic.After recently finishing it on difficult, I sure didn’t have much of adesire to do the entire game again. This is all the more reason thisoption should have been available right from the beginning.

TheAI on both sides (U.S. & German) is superb. The enemy seems to bemuch more aggressive in wanting to end your life as fast as possible inEIB compared to RTH30. They’ll move on your position rather quickly ifyou don’t hurry up and move. They’ll take cover and concealment just asyour teams will. The AI did seem to get repetitive after awhile.Especially if you play like me and are pretty aggressive. I did a lotof quick advances to move on an enemy position to try and take themout. After awhile it was the same routine of, when I got close enoughstand up and open fire, while backpedaling. Don’t get me wrong. That iswhat they should do, though I would have preferred a little morevariety. Something along the lines of crouch down and peer around thecorner at me, take a couple of shots etc. Again, this is one of thoseminor details that doesn’t take away from game play at all, justsomething I picked up on.

The individual chapters give you plenty to do. After finishing thegame if you don’t feel like going back through it on authentic, you canalways try out the new skirmish mode. There are plenty of missions tochoose from with different objectives to keep you busy. When you gettired of doing that on your own, you can always move to online multiplay. Online multi play in itself is a good reason for picking up EIB.

Sound:
The audio portion of EIB is on the same level as the game play ifnot slightly better. It almost reaches a perfect mark in my book.

I enjoyed simple things like each weapon when fired, had its ownunique sound. Some games give you the same sound for every weapon inyour inventory. Not true in EIB. You can hear the difference when theM1 Garand is fired compared to the MP-40 or the MG-42 for that matter.I’ve never heard an MG-42 fired live before, but listening to how itsounds in EIB almost makes me shudder to think how it sounded havingthat thing fired at you in the middle of combat.

Grenades exploding sounded perfect. They weren’t this overwhelmingexplosion that shakes the screens and drowns out all other sound. Justthis medium size, sharply sounding explosion, with a minor dust cloudto let you know it went off.

The voiceovers were simple perfect. There’s nothing else you cansay about them. They were the farthest thing from sounding like theywere read off a script as you can imagine. You can hear the deflectionin their voices when they’re upset, annoyed or happy. Happy doesn’thappen too much in the game, but nevertheless you can still pick it up.

Combine all of that with killer background sound and EIB is game where you really want to crank up the volume.

Graphics:
Another job well done in the graphics area…If you have some extratime, check out the extras options after you finish the game. Just takea look at the images that explain how much detail went into researchinghow a particular weapon looked at functioned. Not only weapons, butchateaus, vehicles and more. Then you can really start to appreciatehow much effort went in to making this game look as good as it soundedand played.

I loved the slow motion, black and white sequences when you werestarting particular chapters, or when you were the unsuspecting victimof a melee attack.

How about when you were too close to an explosion and you wereknocked off your feet? Your ears would ring, the screen would turnblack and white and it would take you some time to recover.

I remember taking out a German soldier who had a wall behind him.After I decimated him, and he slumped over, there was blood spatter onethe wall from his wounds. The rag doll effect was put to great use inEIB. If you took out an enemy soldier in a particular way or fashionthat caused him to fall over, he didn’t just simple fall over andremain motionless. He’d fall over and slowly slump from his side to hisstomach and die.

All these things I mentioned show the attention to detail that I like to see.

Overall:
Brothers In Arms: Earned In Blood is a great game to play. Is itworth purchasing? Again, that will have to be an individual decision.Keep in mind, there’s not much new content from Road to Hill 30. You’repretty much doing the same thing over again, just from a differentperspective. There is improved AI, or at least seemed like there was.The online multiplayer feature is nice and I’m sure to attract its owncrowd that enjoys playing online.

I have a feeling that talks of BIA3 is in the works already.Hopefully in their next installment we’ll be in a different area, ondifferent missions. Although the ‘storming the beach’ saga has beendone over and over and over again, I would be really interested to seehow Gearbox would have it turn out. Hint..hint…hint…