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The gameplay is solid. The default first person controls go against a conventional layout somewhat - players slip into iron-sights view by clicking right stick rather than holding a trigger - but once you've acclimatized, they're solid enough. Luckily, Gearbox has stirred in alternative control schemes corresponding to popular templates in the options menu for the player to happily choose from. You have your crouch, sprint, reload, grenade, weapon switch and much more so once you find your scheme it should be fairly easy depending on choice of difficulty from Casual, Veteran, and Authentic.
With the press of the back button, you have your tactical map. Players won't get very far without the tactical map. It furnishes you with a terrain overview together with the locations of allies, visible enemies, your next objective and "reconnaissance points." Hell's Highway makes definite strides over its predecessors in this regard: enemies and allies are hot-keyed to the face buttons, saving you the necessity of scrolling to find them, clutter is minimized, and the icons themselves are more conspicuous. Actually ordering your men into the fray takes place in real-time, however, so players won't be able to sit back coolly and watch your tactics unfold from on high. Each squad is mapped to a D-pad direction. Holding left trigger brings up a cursor locked to the center of your view; to send your gun-toting farm boys somewhere, you simply aim and release (cue some excellent dynamic vocals). Gearbox has side-stepped tedious menu-shuffling by making the cursor context-sensitive: slide it over a fortified emplacement, for instance, and it'll morph into a little bazooka symbol. Tapping D-pad down orders your men to bunch up at your heels.
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Health is now of the forgiving, recharging variety, with the likelihood of death indicated by a deepening blood-red screen filter. Then there's that new cover mechanic: tap left bumper in the vicinity of something bullet-retardant and Baker will lock to it while the camera slips into third person. Players can then slide along to a corner, lean out and zoom in for a shot, or hit A to vault low cover. Sadly, the new cover mechanic does make it rather too easy to hide, peek and slot your way through engagements, particularly given the limitations of the command system.
The cursor is tied rather inflexibly to your line of sight, which can be a pain in the ass when you're negotiating an untidy battlefield: it's often impossible to get a squad to take up position on the other side of a wall, for instance, as you can only move the cursor where you can see it. Gearbox has tried to redress things by pulling the view back and up a little when you hold left trigger, but this is an incomplete solution at best. The cursor also struggles with depth recognition: while you can exercise a fair degree of precision within your immediate surroundings, setting a waypoint in the middle distance is a fiddly business, especially if you're moving the cursor over higher elevations.
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