Art of the iPhone

Brothers in Arms: Hour of Heroes ($4.99, iTunes link) is impressive in its scope and design; it’s easily the largest game in terms of size and unique gameplay for the iPhone that we’ve reviewed yet. The action is nonstop, and the overall game design is challenging and well planned. If it weren’t for a flawed control scheme, the game would easily be the best iPhone game released so far. However, the inadequacies of the game’s touchscreen controls sometimes bog down what would be a perfect first-person WWII shooter. But even the shaky controls can’t ruin a game this well designed. We are rating it an 7.7 out of 10, recommended. Watch our video review below for a closer look.

The strength of Brothers in Arms is its cinematic design. You are thrown into the middle of the action that never lets up. The game consists of 13 missions scattered through 3 campaigns, and each mission consists of dozens of objectives like dropping grenades in tanks, blowing up bunkers, sniping enemy troops, and lighting smoke flares to call in air support. Each element of the game flows together seamlessly and logically, making it feel as if you are part of a larger story. Your actions are always clearly guided by text as well as arrows that point to your next objective. There is a small amount of puzzle solving, but it’s light. Most of the game is about executing your mission rather than the passivity of thinking about how to accomplish it. There is challenge, but it comes from doing everything correctly.

The game offers the typical first-person shooter features: you collect different types of weapons along the way (sniper rifles, bazookas, etc) and can switch on the fly by tapping a weapons icon in the top left. Aiming is a mixture of manual input (dragging your finger) along with a little AI–you’d don’t always have to be dead on to hit an enemy, but you do have to be generally close. Overall, the developers did a good job of balancing the different aspects of aiming–they’ve taken some of the frustration out while still maintaining challenge.

The biggest flaw of Brothers in Arms is a touch control scheme that attempts to mimic the physical directional pad seen on the PSP and other hardware gaming console controllers. While adequate to get the job done, there are moments of frustration where you are distracted from the game to focus on the controls. Even after practice, there is sometimes a struggle to aim your weapon, move your solider, or steer a jeep.

The game also suffers from the typical point-of-view visibility problems that tend to plague first-person shooters. Visibility is often obstructed by a wall or a roof of a building. Also, some obstacles that block your solider’s path are not visible on-screen, so you end up doing blind maneuvering around rocks and dead soldiers that are just below the above-the-waist perspective.

The developers took advantage of the unique features of the iPhone; they’ve utilized both multitouch and the iPhone’s accelerometers. Multitouch is required to direct the soldier with one hand while also tapping the fire button with the other. The game also utilizes the two-fingered pinch gesture used with other iPhone apps. For example, when armed with a sniper rifle, a reverse inch will zoom your rifle’s scope, just like zoomsing in on web pages or pictures in your photo album. There is also some tilt gaming: when throwing a grenade, you tilt the iPhone to aim for a target area.

The game is not only large in scope, it is also one of longer games in terms of game time. Total time to solve the game is around 15 hours, which is not bad for a $10 iPhone game.

Conclusion

Despite its control flaws, Brothers in Arms: Hour of Heroes is a large, cinematic gaming experience filled with well-scripted, nonstop action. This is the first iPhone game comparable to a $30 PSP or Nintendo DS game. Be prepared for some light frustration with the controls, but also look forward to some cool WWII combat action.

Brothers in Arms $4.99