Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood

The Brothers are back with a new story and a slew of fresh features.

Earned in Blood follows the story of Sgt. Joe "Red" Hartsock and his Airborne squad as they fight their way through Nazi occupied France following the Allied invasion on D-Day. The gameplay in this new story mode maintains the familiar mechanics of commanding your troops in combat by directing their movements and ordering them to fire on specific targets. However, the process of assigning actions and movements to your squad is an uneven process, as the simplistic and straightforward control scheme is easy to understand but can be a bit unwieldy to control at times (due mainly to the PS2 controller layout and an over-assignment of commands to just a few key buttons). The result of a single botched command or accidental mismanagement can mean death for you and your troops, making Earned in Blood a frustrating (but not unrewarding) experience.

The Long March to Victory
While the overall production values are high, the underwhelming graphics suffer on the PS2 but are partially compensated for by the outstanding atmosphere, soundtrack and sound effects. Earned in Blood scores points for superb authenticity, but effort is lost in a few places (like when trying to aim down the blurry, narrow sight of an M1 Garand) where the attempted realism hampers the fun and only serves to remind us of how amazingly not-fun real war is. Even so, the realism isn't without merit, as your AI squad members are fairly competent and often will eliminate enemies before you can finish them off. Plus, the new multiplayer modes are fun, objective based mini-campaigns that add hours to the replay value (with the exception of the embarrassingly bad split-screen competitive mode).

United We Stand
If you're a fan of tactical squad based FPS titles and can appreciate the difficulties associated with realistic combat management, then Earned in Blood is well worth your time. That said, arcadey shooter fans (yes you, Halo 2 fan boys) will likely be aggravated by the deliberate pacing and steep difficulty that will have them dying--a lot.

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