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In the "Brutality of War" trailer for Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway, blood explodes in the air after enemies and allies get shot in the arms, legs, and head. In one particularly graphic scene a grenade explodes underneath a particularly unfortunate soldier dismembering him and leaving a green, white, and red mess of bone and blood-stained uniform. It’s as fictional as the war itself, and as David Cooke, the game’s director, indicates, that’s the whole point.

Speaking to MTV, Cooke said other war shooters put a layer of "varnish" on their violence, indicating such choices in aesthetic put a "sugar coating" on the experience. In defense of their not holding back on the level of gore in Hell’s Highway, Cooke said:

I can’t say that we ever consciously said ‘well, what role does the gore play in the game?’ We knew it was a risk. On the one hand, we don’t want to make it just over-the-top and totally ridiculous and just gore for its own sake. We never had that goal to ‘well, let’s make the most awesomest gore ever.’ We had really set out to make it sort of surprising and powerful because you can’t talk about war and not have it.

As Speilberg’s dramatic opening sequence in Saving Private Ryan illustrated, for an appropriately mature audience faithfully delivering the brutality of war delivers a powerful message and indelibly sets the dramatic tone for a piece. More and more we’re seeing that same sort of presentation in videogames seeking to convey that same sense of gravity. While some will continue to dismiss this as simply another attempt to make violence a gimmick such as it came off in the Soldier of Fortune games, only by continuing forward with judicious application of realism in serious games can developers hope to change that sentiment. Whether Hell’s Highway achieves that will probably be a hotly contested point.

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