Brothers in Arms is an upcoming squad-based first person shooter coming from Ubi Soft and Gearbox. Ubi Soft, who has recently brought us the top first person shooter Far Cry, has teamed up with Gearbox, known from the PC version of Halo and several Half-Life expansion packs, and both are now gearing up to attack the market of World War 2-based shooters where games like Call of Duty, Medal of Honor and Battlefield have set the first steps.

Players of Call of Duty will immediately recognise the surroundings of Brothers in Arms. The whole game is set in Carentan (one of the more popular maps for multiplayer in CoD) a French village where the 101st Airborne troops had a rather big fight against the German troops.
You will lead your troops through a gripping storyline which is based on the actual events and Gearbox has done a lot to make things as real as possible. The whole town has been carefully recreated as it was back in the days of the war and Gearbox has also had cooperation from a veteran from the 101st who was brought in on the game from the very beginning to make sure everything looked and acted as if it was real.

Gearbox is doing their best to make this game stand out of the crowd and the idea is to make sure the player gets drawn into the storyline and will get connected with his teammates. The emotional bonding with your team is a very big aspect of the game and will help you make tactical decisions.
That of course means that the AI of not only your opponents but also your team members needs to be top notch and from what we’ve seen it looks like Gearbox might just pull it off. Your team consists of 2 groups, one squad for pinning down the enemy and one group that will follow you when you try to get a crossfire set up to get rid of the Germans. The tactics are set up like they were used by the US army during WW2 and it seems to work pretty well.
We saw an attack on a building where the US forces encountered German soldiers. Our teammates immediately started taking cover and returning fire without us giving any orders. No stupid running into the line of fire here, your teammates look to have some brains in their skull after all.
Once our first group started to pin down the axis forces, we managed to sneak around and start shooting at them from another angle, making it easier to kill them in a crossfire. Pretty cool to see.

Commanding your troops is easy with point and click interface and once you get hold of the system you’ll be quickly used to it, making your team a deadly weapon against your opponents.

Of course AI isn’t everything in a first person shooter and Gearbox clearly realises that. Therefore they’ve made some stunning graphics. The way the characters are modelled is just awesome. The facial animations and especially the eyes are truly amazing to see.
The same goes for the whole game in fact. The surroundings look like a town that’s been under heavy fire, the tanks look and act like real ones and handle differently depending on the type, the weapons look and feel like real WW2 arms, etc etc etc.

The game is set for a release at the end of this year but if what we’ve seen is any indication to how far the game is completed, I would almost think it’s already finished. Of course, Gearbox will probably now be doing bugchecking and such but this title looked so polished and so great that we just can’t wait to get it in our hands. Keep your eyes on this game, unless Gearbox screws up badly, it will rock!