It’s not often that a first person shooter comes along and I genuinely get excited anymore, yes Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4 got the juices flowing but they didn’t really provide anything substantially new or innovative in terms of gameplay. Once the campaigns were finished they both had comprehensive multiplayer options, and despite the fact that I’m sure I’ll go back to their multiplayer games at some point, dare I say it... they did get old rather quickly.
Set in the near future the story of Frontlines: Fuel of War is told by a TV reporter embedded with the Stray Dogs military division of the Western Coalition. Loosely based upon real locations in Central Asia, you play an elite soldier with the Stray Dogs, fighting your way through an epic campaign featuring 7 missions. It’s the year 2024, a time when the superpowers (the Western Coalition & the Red Star Alliance of Russia & China) are clashing to gain control of nearly-depleted natural resources. A brief timeline goes something like this; starvation and anarchy rules at home while the armed forces try to stabilize the World by invading terrorist havens and trying to protect oil-rich countries - eventually even invading Russia, who naturally have their own needs and aims. An unlikely plotline? I don’t think so, at times it sounds scarily plausible, in fact you’d have to be naïve to think that it’s not already happening. But when did a manically depressing storyline ever stop a game from being good, or me from having fun?
I’m going to do this review arse-backwards and talk about Frontline’s multiplayer mode first. For the first time on any console a FPS has 32 player support, and that’s no mean achievement – Bungie would have loved to manage to get Halo 3 running with 32, or even 24 players. Dedicated servers also mean that lag - the bane of FPS players lives - is rarely an issue. There are 8 varied maps, some of which are over 4 square miles in size – so big that they’d take you several minutes to run across. One is so big that it even allows you to fly fighter/bomber jets – admittedly if you use the afterburner, you’re across the map so quickly, it feels a bit like you’re trying to fly one round your front room, but learning to fly them with any success is one of the game’s great challenges. Rather than having canyon walls or invisible barriers make the map’s borders, if stray too far away from the action and you’ll get a nagging “return to the field of battle” message, ignore it and you’ll start to black out and die. Maps this big in a FPS are rare, so it’s no surprise to discover that developers Kaos (formerly Trauma Studios) were responsible for Desert Combat, a hugely popular Battlefield 1942 mod on the PC. They also had a PS3 version in development but this was shelved or cancelled, presumably due to the same problems that many developers have allegedly had getting the Unreal engine to run on Sony’s machine.
The game’s title comes from a central gameplay mechanic, the frontline. This means the battle line is drawn with objectives dotted along it – capture these and the frontline extends into enemy territory. This also means that during multiplayer battles you may gain or lose access to new weapons and equipment -this could range from captured drones and even vehicles will be supplied at the newly captured bases. Voice communication between teammates isn’t (perhaps strangely) immediately available, but I suspect this is to save bandwidth from being clogged up with the inane chatter, trash-talking and smart-mouthing you get on Halo 3 et al. You must form a squad in order to communicate (up to 4) and can then coordinate attack runs or defensive strategies, even mark targets on your squad’s HUDs (or just yell at a mate for flying off in your attack chopper).
The single player campaign also uses the Frontline system and this means that most missions are completely non-linear, and give the game that freeform “sandbox” feel that gamers so love. If Battlefield 2, GRAW & Mercenaries had a lovechild, this’d be it. The vehicles and their handling have been given some deserved attention too, they all look detailed and handle appropriately – tank lovers can’t fail to be impressed by the way tracked vehicle’s wheels soak up humps and bumps, or rock and recoil when they fire their main guns. I was less impressed by the way they just drop in at new spawn points – they should have been airdropped in like in Halo. Unlike Battlefield 2 taking to the air doesn’t mean a brief flirtation with odd controls followed by certain death as you’re shot down either, the helicopters control really well and have stealth modes or flares to protect them against missile lock-ons. When hit you can even sometimes bail out and parachute to safety.
The game gives you some really neat toys to play with, or rather I should call them future weapons or drones. A few other games have featured remotely-controlled gadgets, but rather than being just a toy to do some menial task or give you a view of the battlefield ahead, these drones are also useful (vital, even) weapons to aid your progress. The flying UAV drone can reconnoiter enemy units, then show them on the player's HUD and map, and then when its tasks are completed can be returned to the operator or be detonated to cause substantial damage to the immediate area and any nearby soldiers. There are three other drones; the Assault Drone, a small tracked vehicle with minigun mounted on top, a similar 4-barrelled mortar drone, and the RC buggy drone, which is packed with C4 and can be used to destroy armored targets – even main battle tanks. Play enough Frontlines multiplayer and you will see soldiers running away from these, even tanks backing off and the drivers & gunners bailing out in panic!
Technically Frontlines has a lot going on on-screen. Vast draw distances, detailed character models and vehicles (the Western Coalition and the Red Flag different sides vehicles are similar in firepower and purpose but completely different visually, in design and in terms of the types of weapons they carry). There are lots of detailed, often destructible objects and scenery – all of which can be assaulted with some of the most realistic munitions effects (both in terms of visuals & sound) I’ve yet seen. Stand next to a main battle tank when it’s firing its main gun and you’ll see what I mean – Obviously it’s even more impressive if you’re on the receiving end, but you probably won’t appreciate that so much.
I loved the Frontlines campaign and its online game too, and see myself playing it for some time to come. Yes, it has some graphical anomalies, clipping and texture glitches and horizontal tearing (you can turn v-synch on but it does hit the frame rate occasionally), but most of the time it’s doing so much more to immerse you in the game that you’ll forgive it. Frontlines is a game that dared to try and do something a little bit different in a ridiculously competitive genre, and succeeded in almost every department. A co-op mode seems a daft omission to me, but the online multiplayer feels so much like the campaign mode that you’ll hardly miss it. Highly recommended.
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