This is probably the least enjoyable first person shooter I've played since Halo.
I'm probably biased, because what I really want is one-man-army style gameplay. I don't really want to have to use strategic war tactics with my teammates in order to defeat the enemy.
The idea in BIA is to have one team firing on the enemy while you (and another team) flank them to catch them off guard. This gets boring pretty quick, and in the end I just got tired of having to use these tactics. Unfortunately if you don't, it's a very difficult game. Even on easy skill setting you can't play the entire game as you would any other first person shooter. The enemy will mow you down with bullets in no time.
The other problem is that there's no quicksave. Now a few checkpoints per level aren't too bad in some shooters. But when you have a realistic shooter where a few shots could kill you and there's no way to replenish your health, it's very frustrating to have to go back several minutes to a previous checkpoint. What's worse is your health meter is useless. Eventually after a certain amount of shots it'll go red, then after a certain amount more you'll die. It should have been an exact progressive meter, not an inconsistent colour change.
To add to the frustration your teammates are quite useless. On a few levels they managed to get themselves killed by mortar attacks within minutes of the level starting. If I didn't micro-manage them, they'd walk directly into a machine gun and be dead in seconds.
Gearbox made the weapons more realistic than standard shooters. That means you can be standing point-blank in front of your enemy and still somehow miss them. The aiming is designed to be imperfect. I simply found it frustrating rather than a good realistic feature.
And finally we come to the level design and graphics which, again, are a big let down. The levels are all very flat, decorated with bland buildings/houses and fields. The textures are all uninspiring and drab. The only memorable parts of the game were defending a couple of good looking churches.
Overall, the design is not up to the standards of Call of Duty or Medal of Honor, while the gameplay was a nice try for something different, but for me it got frustrating by the end.
MORE REVIEWS AT www.etherealhell.com