There's no one there; everyone's gone. All those who spent years plundering this war for its spoils have moved on. Sure, the armies of Treyarch are still honouring the call in the east, seemingly duty bound to do so for infinity, but no longer are there battalions waiting in the wings of Europe, the virtual battlefields have become no-man's-lands, the digital bullets and distorted dramatisations of history have disappeared. All apart from those of Sgt. Baker and his men, who still see the lights on the stage and hear the colossal overture in their ears as they prepare to enter once again at the height of the din, this time onto Hell's Highway, which they hope will lead them right up to the Devil's front door. Their conflicts are still very real and there are stories still to be told, because while this latest episode reaffirms Brothers in Arms' success as an affecting and cerebral first person shooter series, it's also, most definitely, an incomplete one.

Of all those profiteering from the gold mine of World War II material, it's unsurprising that Hell's Highway developers Gearbox Software are likely to be the last to retreat, or that they've changed little from previous campaigns. Theirs is definitely a franchise with high aspirations for a videogame, one which attempts to salute the casualties of the heat of war (lives, friendships, trust and sanity) as firmly as its cold mechanics - and in this third instalment of the series they're striving to intertwine these two strands tighter than a barbed wire fence.

In maintaining Brothers in Arms' contrary position to that of other WWII games, the setting for Hell's Highway isn't some great Allied victory but instead 1944's failed push through Holland, codenamed Operation Market Garden. Similarly, its central protagonist isn't some superhuman Nazi-smasher, cutting single-handedly through the German lines with machinegun in hand and an endless supply of dry one-liners on the tip of his tongue, pausing only to take a congratulatory telephone call from Mr Churchill himself. Instead it's returning American G.I. Joe Average, Sgt. Matthew Baker of 101st Airborne Division, leading his men into the verdant, sheep-filled Dutch countryside, the lambs to Field Marshall Montgomery's slaughter.

Despite beginning with a 'previously on Brothers in Arms' sequence, which serves to confuse more than recap, the opening to Hell's Highway clearly establishes the title's desire to achieve a parity between gameplay and storytelling. The single player campaign is divided into chapters that are rationed out equally between playable levels and major cut scenes, with the first of the latter including a single three and a half minute tracking shot that walks you around the 101st's camp, introducing you to the ensemble cast. Gearbox seem to appreciate that nowadays any new treatment of WWII will be inherently littered with clichés and have therefore simply cherry picked their favourite cinematic techniques to create something akin to a cross between the great war films of the past and modern classics like Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. Flashbacks, narration, and an inspiring orchestral score have all been conscripted, while the camera is constantly put to work, one minute sweeping across an epic war scene, the next narrowing its gaze to focus on Baker's physical scars while hinting at the mental ones that the story soon reveals to be more like gaping wounds. The tone is often sombre and the humour, when it comes, is appropriately black and generally well placed; the whole tale is told with a sincerity, dedication and sense for drama that just isn't present in other games of Hell's Highway's ilk.

Unlike these, Hell's Highway isn't some wannabe Flanders fragfest; it wants you to connect to the main character on an emotional level. Thankfully, Baker is a sympathetic if not overly charismatic lead and filling his boots again becomes a tale of worn soles and shoulders carrying an invisible weight much greater than the standard issue pack. This is very much his journey through a world turned upside down by war, a place where friendly towns are now filled with silence and fear, and the quiet of church graveyards is shattered as bullets punch short but decisive epitaphs in the stones. The beautiful city of Eindhoven, once resplendent in the sunlight, has become a carcass burning in the darkness.

While the story sections do their best to tackle the game's central theme of leadership, their non-interactive nature means they can only carry this idea so far, and it's left to the gameplay to achieve the sense of empathy that Hell's Highway is striving for. At any given time you can have up to three squads under your command, each with their own unique strengths. Thanks to the design of the control system, which allows you to cycle through your teams with the circle button and order them into position or direct them to fire on specific enemies by navigating the context-sensitive command ring, the basic training in the find 'em, fix 'em, flank 'em and finish 'em system of dealing with opponents that you received in the first level quickly becomes second nature; the squads become the physical facilitators of your tactical mind. Almost every skirmish sees you digging in, planning your tactics and learning to view the realistic, destructible environments as your friend; the stone wall off to your right may initially be providing cover for some German soldiers who are quickly shredding the picket fence that you're sheltering behind, but a couple of suppressing bursts from your team will allow your assault squad to sneak down the German's side and finish them off, leaving you free to move your bazooka team into their position for a protected shot on the sandbagged machinegun emplacement up ahead, and what began as an irritation turns into the key to your victory.

Such a fixed framework to the combat could easily have become repetitive, so it's to the developer's great credit that it doesn't; by constantly altering the variables - the number of squads you have, the landscape and conditions you're fighting in and the current position in the story - Hell's Highway continually feels like a fresh challenge. The difficulty slowly ramps up as you progress, throwing enemies at you from different angles, denying you the luxury of time and making your ability to read situations and strategise vital to your success. The game also helps you to realise what type of a leader you are: the inspirational kind who commands from the front or one who sits back, acting on percentages rather than emotions. Some subtle level design choices suggest that the developer believes a balance of the two is the best option, but whatever tactics you choose, watching them pay off is extremely satisfying; whereas once the Germans were the aggressors, outnumbering and outgunning you, now their stragglers cower behind cover, making occasional, half-hearted attempts to return fire before finally throwing in the towel completely and making a desperate attempt to flee. In its best moments, such as when you are on your own, ghosting around a bombed out hospital, or leading your squads through the derelict factory district of Eindhoven, Hell's Highway undeniably succeeds in getting story and gameplay to join forces but, despite rallying so passionately around this ideal, it isn't a perfect marriage - and the blame for this can be almost evenly distributed between these two supposed allies.

On the gameplay side, the controls are unnecessarily awkward at times, with the cover system too clumsy and the aiming ring for grenades seeming to almost contentiously object to being placed anywhere it might actually cause suffering to the enemy. Just as unfortunately, the brains of your men appear to have abandoned their posts and deserted en masse, resulting in your squads regularly getting themselves stuck, finding it impossible to shoot through windows or other gaps and taking the most idiotic routes in front of cover rather than behind it. This is an offence for which you really should have them shot, if the Germans hadn't already taken care of this for you. These flaws certainly land a hit on the game's push for immersion, as does the lack of any option to remove the colour-changing dots from above enemies' heads that identify whether they're firing freely or suppressed, as well as the missions where you relinquish control of Baker in favour of a tank, which have been included to provide some variation but feel like you're driving the Army Surplus Special from Wacky Races.

Hell's Highway's position on the depiction of the visceral imagery of war is also hard to pin down. Are the slow motion moments when you see a headshot pop an enemy's skull like a ripe melon or an explosion send decapitated limbs sailing through the air a device to try and highlight the contrasting feelings of exhilaration and guilt the a soldier may have in such situations, or nothing more than an olive branch to the immature shooter crowd? And why, after all of this, do we see Baker lining up an unwitting German soldier in the crosshairs of his rifle in one of the cut scenes, only for the camera to cut away as the sound of the shot rings out? There are times when the story plays its emotional cards in a heavy-handed manner or without enough impact, with such moments usually the result of lifeless facial animations and voice acting so wooden that you fear the poor character who delivered the lines will spend the rest of the war in a convalescent hospital having the splinters removed from his mouth.

Due to the game's intense focus on Baker and his men, the overall failure of Market Garden is also virtually lost. Your continual successes in each of the levels stands in stark contrast to the wider outcome of the operation, making the single player campaign seem more like a victory than a defeat, and when you do finally reach its end, you can't help feeling that from both a narrative and gameplay standpoint, it's one chapter too long. The penultimate level ends with a real fire and brimstone last stand of a battle, where you and your men are fighting for your lives, and what comes after its ferocity is a major anticlimax.

The central example of the strained relationship between the gameplay and story comes each time one of your men is shot in action. Such an event would appear to be the perfect opportunity to bring together all the big themes and deliver possibly the ultimate example of what leadership is all about. In the heat of battle it's down to you to make a spur of the moment life or death decision. Do you risk your own life and the lives of the other men under your control - individuals who the story has brought you to care for - in a possibly futile attempt to save just one of your number, or do you leave them and move on? Throw in a mini-game involving some desperate field triage and it sounds like the kind of idea that Brothers in Arms would revel in, but the game includes nothing of the kind. Instead, all that happens in this situation is that you lose the use of that soldier for a while until he pops up again later on, usually after the next cut scene.

It is this single scenario, which is repeated time and time again throughout Hell's Highway, that brings to light the quiet conflict going on within Brothers in Arms' tale of war. Ideas such as the one above are missing because, as much Hell's Highway blends story and gameplay, it is also constantly carrying out an uncomfortable balancing act between the two and, in situations where conflict arises, the former has to overpower the latter to ensure that the pre-planned structure works in the long term. The result is that there are no alternative histories in Hell's Highway and, for a game whose story contains a strong line in questions over whether or not we are all bound by fate, it's ironic that the very narrative raising these issues is so preordained that there are no greater consequences to your actions than a visit to the continue screen.

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway does come with a multiplayer mode for up to twenty players featuring squad-based combat and specialist abilities for each soldier, but while it's perfectly competent, it doesn't feel like Gearbox's heart is really in it. Hell's Highway is all about its single player narrative, which, just like the river crossings that Sgt. Baker and his men are trying to capture, is by its very nature as rigid as it is strong, and while this does create issues for the game, these are in no way sufficient to excuse failing to experience what the game has to offer. In the future, when people look back on this period in videogame history, Hell's Highway will stand as a fitting memorial to some of the best work that developers were accomplishing in the WWII genre, even if its dream of a perfect synergy between story and gameplay may have been a bridge too far.

Reviewed by James Hamblin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).