For a couple of years there, gamers were surrounded on all sides by World War II themed shooters, on the verge of being overrun and with war weariness at an all-time high. This sustained saturation campaign began on the original Xbox, with a pincer attack involving medals of honour and calls to duty, with a second wave of brothers in arms launched not long after. The Xbox 360 succumbed to the onslaught as well, peppered by the likes of Battlestations: Midway and Hour of Victory before fresh recruits from old adversaries returned to do battle once more.

Of course the constant combat of years gone by could only be repeated so often, and when a former foe returned in the guise of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, it seemed like the end might finally be in sight. It was a breath of fresh air for a genre gone stale, and it has been almost one year since the second world war was last fought on consoles in living rooms the world over. But the uneasy truce could only last so long, and intelligence reports that Brothers in Arms has fired the opening salvos in a return to WWII...codename: Hell's Highway.

Don't groan, please. Or sigh. Or roll your eyes. Don't even yawn, it's really quite rude. Sure, you've fought this fight against Fascism at least a half dozen times, you feel like you're actually a part of the 101st Airborne, and you've learned so much about Operation: Market Garden that you feel like you memorised it as part of your mission orders. But Gearbox have taken the time to develop another sequel to their popular, squad-focused WWII shooter, so the least you can do is pretend to be interested, dammit!

For those of you who aren't virtual veterans of WWII, Hell's Highway refers to the reputed nickname given to a long stretch of roads leading to the Dutch town of Eindhoven, which the famous 101st Airborne were tasked with securing and defending as part of Operation: Market Garden. The plan was simple on paper: drop two American paratrooper regiments into enemy-occupied territory, and use them to secure key roads and bridges to allow British armour to roll across the Netherlands and break Hitler's back in the region. Of course such things rarely go entirely as planned, and our story follows Staff Sergeant Matt Baker and his squad through the trials and tribulations of this important allied assault.

One of the crucial things to note with Hell's Highway is that it is actually the third chapter in an ongoing story, meaning Sgt. Baker and a number of other characters will be quite familiar to players who battled through the previous Brothers in Arms titles. Everyone else will instead be confused as hell for quite a while; even the provided recap does little to really flesh out the back-story. Which is a shame, really, because it involves a cursed pistol and a shell-shocked Sgt. Baker on the verge of a mental breakdown, and is much more interesting than you probably would've expected.

This is partly thanks to the mature storytelling techniques Gearbox have employed to bring the story to life, using long shots in which the camera pans and moves to follow individuals and groups as they chat, bitch and moan or share personal moments, allowing you to pick up snippets of conversation and plot points. It's very similar to the "walk and talk” technique pioneered by TV shows like The West Wing, and really makes you feel like you're on the ground experiencing the action, and it's much more engrossing than the ham-fisted efforts of most console shooters.

But if you want a rich narrative and war-time camaraderie you can go watch Band of Brothers – you're here for the combat, right? Well Hell's Highway delivers on this front too, combining a lot of cover-based first person shooting with a decent squad based system in hectic environments to deliver a solid experience all around. As has become the norm, simply running and gunning will usually end in your bloody death, so you'll need to make the most of the terrain and objects on the battlefield to provide cover from the German assault, of which there is an abundance, thankfully.

The Brothers in Arms series has always taken this one step forward by making you think about more than just yourself: Sgt. Baker is often in command of two or even three specialist squads of soldiers who can carry a variety of weapons including bazookas and machineguns. Managing these squads is half your battle: keeping them out of harm's way, using them to pin down enemies so you can flank, it's what Brothers in Arms is all about. Hell's Highway is no different, and the mechanics work pretty well even if the default controls can be a little awkward. Early on you'll often accidentally march your men into the path of a machinegun emplacement or throw a grenade by mistake, but after awhile you'll get used to the controls. In a nice move, Ubisoft convinced the team at Gearbox to implement an optional control scheme that mimics that of Rainbow Six Vegas 2, which is handy if you're familiar with that game.

It's not all roses though, because the controls can be a little finicky no matter which scheme you choose, and the cover system doesn't always behave the way it should. Sometimes you'll stick to objects you don't think you ever could, while other times a seemingly flat and even surface will refuse to play ball and you'll get shredded by German bullets. Not only that, bullets sometimes travel through cover they shouldn't, allowing you to die in locations that should be safe. Maybe that sort of random luck (or unluck!) is realistic, but in a game it's kind of annoying.

Still, if you're hiding behind a wooden fence or crate then it's your own fault, since Hell's Highway features destructible cover. Sustained bullet fire will shred most timber-based cover, while a grenade or rocket attack can easily take out sandbags and even some stone walls. Of course there's a disproportionate amount of cover that refuses to yield to even the most withering assaults, which is always jarringly unrealistic but still par for the course. That said, even if your high explosives won't take out that pesky wall, they'll sure as hell blast the unlucky bastards standing behind it to bits!

Make no mistake: Hell's Highway is a gory game. It's not over-the-top gibs ahoy sort of gore, but that almost makes it worse. Unlike EA's Medal of Honour series where bullet strikes tend to cause a small puff of dust to discharge from an opponent's jacket, Brothers in Arms has no qualms with gouts of blood spraying through the air, particularly from headshots. And if you hit someone with explosives, you can expect some serious dismemberment to occur, complete with arm or leg bone protrusions and mildly nauseating havoc-physics induced bouncing body-parts to boot. Pull off a headshot or place your grenade well enough and you'll be treated with "action camera,” a slow-mo zoom in on the carnage you've created. It's gore-porn pure and simple and not at all in keeping with the game's purported realism, but it can be pretty stylishly done and makes the whole thing feel like more of a Hollywood blockbuster than an old wartime newsreel.

The one place you don't want realism is in your checkpoints or autosaving, and unfortunately Hell's Highway is far from angelic in this regard. The spacing between autosaves is schizophrenic, often occurring only after long, protracted encounters, meaning a single mistake can involve replaying ten or twenty minutes worth of combat. Coupled with the random cover and occasionally iffy controls, this can lead to some needless frustration, particularly with higher difficulty settings where a single mistake can easily equal death.

Hell's Highway doesn't use a fixed health system, instead emulating Gears of War's gradually reddening screen and eventual recovery to full-colour display. The degrees of red/death can be hard to decipher though, and different types of damage affect how much red/death you suffer, making the whole thing feel unnecessarily vague and imprecise. Throw in questionable enemy respawning and your squad-mates getting in your bloody way all the time, and you don't quite have a recipe for disaster, but it's hardly a tasty chocolate sundae either.

Aside from the esoteric representation of Sgt. Baker's life and death, Hell's Highway is a pretty great looking game. Visually, it looks almost like a first-person perspective interpretation of Relic's awesome PC strategy title, Company of Heroes...a strong colour palette with lots of hues of brick-dust reds and muted pinks coupled with vibrant, verdant hillsides and beautiful blue skies, all of this contrasted sharply against drab olive army uniforms and the full spectrum of browns and greys we've come to associate with urban environs ravaged by war.

Nor does Gearbox shy away from portraying the full, open countryside of Holland and its surrounds, even at the expense of the game's framerate and performance. And while the occasional on-screen hitches can be distracting, the effect of checking your hand-drawn maps against real-world bearings and landmarks to plot your assault is well worth it. Hell's Highway does its best to allow you a few potential paths to victory in any encounter, but the downside to the sprawling vistas is that nagging sensation that you can't really go anywhere you want, and that you're inevitably being funnelled down a fairly linear path.

There's still plenty to do while you're being funnelled though, and not all of it involves shooting baddies. Each level has two recon points to discover, which are historically significant landmarks or locations that have been carefully rendered by Gearbox to add some authenticity to the experience, and finding them will unlock trivia or history about the locale. Additionally, each area has three "Kilroys,” the name given to a funny looking cartoon face that American G.I.'s used to graffiti as they moved around the battlefield. There's achievements attached to these scavenger hunts, naturally, so completists will need to spend some time searching for these goodies.

Hell's Highway isn't a particularly long or tough road on the easy or normal difficulties, and even with the obligatory replays thanks to the spotty save system you should be able to beat the game in about 6-8 hours. Much of the game can be beaten as a lone gunmen if you can't be bothered with the squad elements, but utilising your team-mates well can speed the process and offset some of the frustration. They'll be particularly important on the unlockable Authentic difficulty, which removes practically all of the onscreen display and information, and ramps up the challenge posed by the German forces.

Speaking of Germans, there is much Deutsch shouting to be had in Hell's Highway, as well as an awful lot of the same responses and comments from your squad-mates repeating ad nauseum. It's a shame they couldn't have recorded another dozen or so snippets to keep it fresh, because the audio is otherwise great in this latest Brothers in Arms experience. Impressive weapon effects and percussive explosions have always been a hallmark of the franchise, and Hell's Highway continues this high standard, as well as providing a solid soundtrack to boot.

Once the war is fought and the campaign is resolved, Hell's Highway has a reasonable multiplayer component for those who want to continue the fight online. There's a handful of maps that see 20 players fighting to capture and raise flags or terminate enemy squads, and for the most part performance is alright. The visuals have been downgraded to allow for almost two-dozen players running around which is a shame, but less lag is always more important than spiffy visuals. For such a squad-oriented game though, it's a damn shame Gearbox didn't see fit to allow you to team up with a half-dozen mates and battle your way through the campaign in co-op.