Brothers in Arms (mobile)

Brothers in Arms came to Java and Symbian in 2007 as a mobile derivative of the war series by Gearbox Software, adapted for phones by Gameloft. The game is set during World War II and takes over the basic suppress-and-flank principle: the player pins down the enemy with fire and then flanks them with a second squad, though in a simplified form and without the full tactical depth of the console and PC entries, where the same principle became the foundation of the whole series.

On the small screen, the shooting worked from a third-person perspective with movement through limited, corridor-like maps - no sprawling battlefield, more a sequence of covered positions and scripted firefights. Direction and aiming were handled by the numeric keypad, shooting by the action button, which for a shooter required quite a bit of adaptation from Gameloft to keep the game playable without a joystick and without precise mouse or stick aiming. Short briefings and military music helped build the atmosphere, though audio on phones of the time sounded noticeably compressed, and the hardware didn't allow for more elaborate battlefield sound effects.

It was one of a number of war licenses that Gameloft regularly ported to mobile in the second half of the decade and sold through carrier stores as paid downloads, the same way it did with other action and war brands. Today the game is effectively unavailable - the platforms for feature phones have disappeared, and without an older device or a J2ME emulator, an ordinary player can't get at it.

Why play it: Interesting mostly as a historical curiosity for Brothers in Arms fans who want to see how the tactical shooter was simplified for a keypad without a joystick.