Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway

Graphics

Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway makes use of the popular Unreal Engine 3, and has been simultaneously released for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. Thankfully we haven’t been left with a graphically gimped version of the game though, and in places the game is graphically stunning – there’s one particular level which takes place in the pouring rain at night that’s brilliantly atmospheric, with rain blurring street lamps and realistically flowing over surfaces, including your squad mates.

Elsewhere the graphical look of the whole game just feels perfect for the subject matter, and while there was some discussion over the overall merits of Hell's Highway’s graphics in the office, the general consensus was a positive one – the night time levels especially, where the lighting effects can really shine, are nothing short of stunning.

However, it’s obvious the game isn’t a PC exclusive when you look in the graphics menus. With just three graphical presets for texture quality, shadow texture quality and shadow detail, able to be set to low, medium and high, there’s not a great deal of graphical tweaking possible, and because it’s the Unreal Engine 3, there’s no options for anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering either – you’ll have to force them from your graphics card’s driver control panel.


Adjusting the three presets for low, medium and high, it’s very difficult to tell the difference, with the crispness and detail in character shadows the main give-away, and no notable differences in environment or character detail or lighting effects. We ran the game at a handful of resolutions on a few different systems and it seems that a low end dual core processor and a GeForce 8800 GT are more than enough to run the game at 1,680 x 1,050 with all the presets set to high.