A lot of us have friends at work. Maybe not the sad old guy who sits in the corner and smells a bit like cabbage, but generally we socialise with our workmates. But would you fight for them? Take a beating for them, or worse? In most cases I’d doubt it. Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 is all about the soldiers of World War II who would have answered yes to those questions, and a hell of a lot more.

You play as Matt Baker of the 101st Airborne, and control a squad of men across the Normandy battlefields during and following D-Day. If you saw the excellent Band of Brothers TV series and thought it would make a good game then you obviously weren’t the only one, in all but name, Brothers in Arms is Band of Brothers: the game. The main theme for the game is “realism”, and it oozes it from every recreated farmhouse to mortar crater. All of your fellow squaddies are very well modelled and detailed, and lots of little set-pieces (like inane banter about whether Superman could beat up Batman) help make the game feel more realistic and less scripted.

Another good element is to sometimes have a tank as your second fire team. This means that not only can you hide like a coward and order the tank to assault infantry positions if you wish (although you have to watch out for anti-tank weapons), but you can also use it as mobile cover, if you need to get down a road which has a machine gun covering it. This is useful, as it keeps your soldiers out of trouble, which they, unfortunately, frequently get themselves into.

After you’ve ordered your men to move to another area of cover, they’ll run to the point like chickens evading a combine harvester. This kind of random pattern gets annoying when there’s a squad of infantry ready to shoot you round the corner, and half of your men get shot because they didn’t hug the wall on the way to cover. Sometimes they don’t even go to the cover at all; they stand out in the open and fire on the enemy, and obviously die if they’re outgunned. The amount of times when I’ve had to kill myself and restart the stage because I don’t have enough men to complete the mission was more than the amount of times I died legitimately, and that’s just not right. For such a top-shelf game with incredible attention to detail in some areas, it’s a shame Gearbox let themselves down with such a big oversight.

As with all first person shooters on Xbox these days BIA comes with Xbox Live play, for 4 players. 4 players might sound small but the good thing is that you all get a squad of A.I troops you can order around the same way you do in the single player. The Xbox Live mode is co-operative objective based. 2 players are the allies and 2 are the Germans. The objectives change from map to map with the likes of delivering orders to a certain point or destroying something like a bridge or AA gun. I’ve had a few problems getting to play the game, either joining a game and having to wait 10 minutes for the one playing to finish or joining a game and then the host leaving, but when you do get into it with the right crowd it’s an interestingly different first person experience, quite unlike any of the others around at the moment. Like I said it plays like the single player with you ordering your troops to put covering fire or charge in but a lot of the time your team mate will think he’s playing Doom 3 or Halo 2 and just charge in guns blazing. Get a good team mate and you can have some really good tactical shoot outs.

So overall with a solid single player and slightly different Live game BIA survives the onslaught. More real than the rest of the WW2 competition, but better than Call of Duty? The jury’s still out for me…