Scroll through Steam’s shooter pages in 2025 and the trend is unmistakable: deliberate, slower-burn military games are thriving. Whether it’s Ready or Not’s tense door breaches or Hell Let Loose’s massive battles, players are rediscovering the satisfaction of planning before pulling the trigger.
Powerful hardware makes advanced ballistics, reactive AI, and large-scale destructibility commonplace, while streaming culture spotlights the drama that emerges when every misstep can doom an entire squad.
In the middle of this resurgence, however, one name is conspicuously absent—a name that helped pioneer tactical pacing two decades ago: Gearbox’s Brothers in Arms.
A Single-Player Void in a Multiplayer World
Most current genre flagships revolve around PvP competition or co-op raids. Escape from Tarkov, Hunt: Showdown, and Rainbow Six Siege excel at fostering teamwork, yet nearly all of their emotional beats stem from outsmarting human opponents rather than inhabiting a story.
Even titles that include “lone-wolf” options treat them as tutorials, stringing together bot matches with minimal context. Players who crave actual narratives inside a tactical framework must look backward rather than forward, and that backward glance led me to replay Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, Earned in Blood, and Hell’s Highway.
Up until this point, I hadn’t finished Earned in Blood either, so there was no better time than now to revisit them. I appreciated how these campaigns demanded genuine small-unit tactics while anchoring every firefight in a specific time, place, and emotion.
Strengths, Stumbles, and the Melodrama Problem
Nostalgia alone is not enough, and the series’ blemishes are part of why it deserves a modern overhaul. My strongest criticism of the series is its penchant for melodrama. Cutscenes linger on teary eyes, slow-motion helmet drops, and florid monologues that spell out themes the visuals already convey, albeit in a limited manner, given its dated visuals.
The intent of humanizing soldiers who might otherwise blur into nameless NPCs is admirable, yet the execution often rings hollow, precisely because few characters escape archetype status. Sergeant Matt Baker is the haunted leader, Corporal Hartsock the loyal confidant, Private Leggett the guilt-ridden rookie; they are functional but not especially memorable.
When Hell’s Highway doubled down on cinematic ambition in 2008, it introduced lone-wolf combat, hallucinations, and stylized violence that jarred against the grounded, squad-tactics loop. Worse, Hell’s Highway assumed players retained intricate knowledge of plot threads from the first two games—an odd choice for an entry marketed as a fresh “next-gen” jump. Newcomers were asked to sympathize with Baker’s trauma without ever seeing the battles that caused it, creating emotional gaps that the script filled with even more exposition.
I did appreciate the depiction of Operation Market-Garden, however, as few games give it the time of day and depict it as the disaster that it was. This was the biggest airborne invasion to date, and only the first Company of Heroes seems to have depicted it as well as Brothers in Arms, with the former focusing on the German perspective.
The franchise wears its influences on its sleeve, coming out after HBO’s Band of Brothers put the US Army’s 101st Airborne into the cultural consciousness. While film is a different medium altogether, I cannot help but make the comparison of just how better written the show is relative to the games. I found that Brothers in Arms nailed the feel of responsibility on the battlefield as a squad leader but struggled to craft equally compelling personalities off it.
What a Modern Brothers in Arms Could Deliver
Modern hardware and design literacy can tackle these shortcomings head-on while amplifying what always worked. First, gunplay can reach parity with today’s best-in-class shooters: authentic recoil, material penetration, and reactive cover would lend weight to every .308 round.
Second, squad control can move beyond finicky radial wheels. Contextual pings, limited voice commands, and AI partners that interpret intent—“suppress that MG until I’m in position”—would preserve tactical depth without bogging players down in menus.
Third, modern hardware could ground the experience visually: photogrammetry for dense European villages (or the franchise could go beyond Europe, even), volumetric weather that affects visibility, and performance-capture subtle enough to convey fear or fatigue without melodramatic voice-over. The games were famous for replicating battlefields with exquisite detail in their layouts, yet I can’t help but yearn for the visuals to match that fidelity.
Most crucially, a reboot could shift up its writing. Instead of leaning on stock archetypes or previous-game backstory, the games could allow for personalities to surface in mechanics rather than in cutscene monologues. Imagine medics who panic when separated from their kit, or a radio operator whose chatter reveals backstory (cliché as that may be), would allow for characterization stronger than monologues.
By grounding its drama in gameplay-based stakes, the series could retain its emotional weight while ridding itself of melodramatic writing. Alternatively, it could lean completely into the soap-opera excesses and go full ham with the melodrama, just as long as both the narrative and gameplay stay coherent.
Passing the Torch to Today’s Players
A revitalized Brothers in Arms would hit a demographic sweet spot. Players weaned on Call of Duty’s roller-coaster campaigns already understand tight gunplay; mil-sim aficionados appreciate methodical pacing but may yearn for narratives; younger gamers raised on live-service titles might want games they can finish and discuss.
The franchise has always occupied that middle ground, teaching suppression, flanking, and enfilade without demanding much knowledge of ballistics. The way the franchise has depicted weapon handling has always been rather clunky, and today’s games have much better ways of depicting “realistic” firearm performance without sacrificing player control. Modernizing its mechanics and tightening its storytelling could turn it into the perfect on-ramp for newcomers to tactical shooters.
An Opportunity Waiting in the Trenches
The tactical-shooter boom proves the market is ready for games that reward brains over brashness (most of the time), yet the current roster leans almost exclusively on multiplayer adrenaline.
Brothers in Arms is uniquely positioned to re-enter the fight, provided it addresses its own narrative blind spots. Pair the franchise with 2025-grade gameplay, gunplay, and squad control, and Gearbox could deliver a campaign that fits in with the modern classics.
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