Frontlines: Fuel of War

This week, I thought I'd try sticking to reviews of more recent games, so I decided on Saturday morning that I'd have a go of Army of Two. Unfortunately, by the end of Saturday, my source of Army of Two had dried out, so I thought I'd try Turok instead. Then I remembered it's been out for about a month now so I just grabbed a copy of Frontlines: Fuel of War. I'm not sure why I tried avoiding it so much, people have been telling me good things about it. It could just be my highly evolved urge to hate my fellow man that causes me to blindly disagree with people.

And so, here we are, Frontlines. For those of you who don't know, the story is - hang on, a game with a story? Sweet merciful Christ, thank you! There's been sod all recently that's had any trace of a story, whatsoever. Right, the story:

The upcoming summer was/is/will be/is going to have been really hot, there were some blackouts and things generally went downhill until the present/future/fictional/definitely not past day in 2024, at which time the earth has all but run out of oil. Rather than removing the human rights of top physicists until they come up with a new form of fuel, two "nations" have formed, by the names of "The Western Coalition" and "The Red Star Alliance" and starting killing each other, like you do. In the single player campaign, you play as a soldier for the Coalition and it's your job to win the war.

Now, strip away all the Mad Max bollocks and you get the typical idea of America didn't piss off China and Russia, but they pissed America off, so America retaliates against those commy bastards, bringing with it any poor voice acting that gets in the way. Remarkably, despite the world being the proud owner of a single barrel of oil, most of the combat involves big, smelly, diesel-powered vehicles, and really big explosions, typically involving other explosive barrels. Surprisingly, no one seems to care that you're arbitrarily wasting more precious fuel. So much for the Greenpeace initiative.

Now, I'm just being mean. It's not Frontline's fault that it was given a story that is only going to contradict the gameplay - as it stands, oil doesn't seem to be an issue, if they used futuristic super weapons, they wouldn't need oil at all - because it really is actually quite fun to play. The weapons seem mostly solid, up until the point when you try to melee someone and it feels like you're swinging a kite around, the enemies seem to shoot like they weren't put there just to write their name on your testicles from 500yds with a machine gun, they can actually miss! The last time I played a shooting game that didn't feature multi-award winning marksman talent was, well, the last time I played a game with some form of half decent story.

I even had great fun just playing with the slightly dodgy physics engine; watching rag dolls fall at inappropriate speeds onto jagged rocks, making their helmets bounce several stories in the air and generally watching corpses bounce off walls in a similar fashion to the characters from Family Guy.

I may have said Frontlines had some fun features, but I didn't actually say anything about unique features. If you want to have fun with physics, go play multiplayer Halo 3 without the update (which, in theory, is supposed to fix the glitch that sends corpses hurtling across the map when melee'd to death). Some of you will right now be thinking "Hang on, what about the equipment and drones etc?", while the rest of you will be thinking "Who the hell ever thinks the word 'etc'?". Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but we've had toys like that since Mario Kart. I mean, yeah, it was a lot more basic, but if you want a modern example, try Halo 3 (again). The only real difference is you can control some of them, but as most people who've played a GTA game since the PS2 was launched, you'll know that's not that unique either. It was a good idea, but I don't think I'll ever understand how a little remote control car can yield more explosive force than a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher.

Speaking of balance issues... let me just put it this way, I spent 90% of the game using the assault rifle, the other 10% mostly being spent in tanks. It just seemed to be the right weapon for every occasion, aside from when some heavy duty explosives needed to be called in. Actually, I lie, there aren't any heavy duty explosives. The biggest blast radius you're going to find is about 4m. Sure, an immensely useful assault rifle means you have more fun in single player, but I have the feeling that being constantly mauled down by a stream of bullets will put a damper on things in multiplayer when everyone else will have the same idea. Not that I'd know, seeing as how I can't get any frigging access to Xbox Live at the minute.

The single player campaign is short. I'm thinking Call of Duty 4 short, only a little shorter. A had a quick go on Sunday night, and I finished a few hours ago. So, not such a good game without online access. Don't dare think I've been devoting time to it, I've had other work to do. The cutscenes seem to have been rendered mostly using ye olde Xbox technology, and always end with some cheesy as hell disaster. I quote, "Holy crap, they've just nuked us". Pardon me, but if you're in a situation to say that, you're going to be more concerned with the fact that in the slim chance you're going to survive, you'd better enjoy company, because you're going to grow another three heads.

Even on Medium difficulty, the game seemed determined to let me win by giving me a character that could (and did on many occasions) survive a direct hit by a rocket in the face. It even let me fire a whole two bullets to remove the pest that had left me with a smoking head, before I had to move on and take over some more objectives.

Now this brings me to my biggest problem. The only thing I bothered to pay attention to about the game before I got hold of it was that it revolves around capturing objectives to push the front line forward - hence the name, Frontlines. Clever, right? Wrong. It works in more or less the same way Star Wars Battlefront works. The most significant difference being that you can't even hold just one command point and pick off the set number of reinforcements to win. In fact, I much prefer Battlefront because the enemy is actually intelligent enough to tack back command points, rather than keep running off back towards their front line only to finally arrive with a few hundred bullets in their spine. OK, on one mission, a pair of Red Star soldiers tried taking back an objective, but they sure as hell didn't succeed, and it never happened again. What? It's a war game. Deserters should be shot, and with me in charge, they all were.

The box promises you can "fly, drive and shoot 60 weapons and vehicles in an open world". I'm not sure about the 60 thing, I'd probably count about 20 (with a corresponding 20 for the Red Star, but they're going to be exactly the same things, just looking a little different). The "open world" bit, now I'm not going to argue with that, the maps are very open and I'm pretty certain you can get to anywhere you can see. That is, however, if you enjoy being shouted at constantly by some faceless General telling you to get your cowardly arse back in the battlefield.

I'm not too sure whether the game was trying to imply that my character was really really, super-manly soldier man, or "just another soldier", because even though I could leap off the top of sniper towers and carry on by doing little more than gritting my teeth, then go on to punch Russians to death, it seems that grenades of the future will be made from a random cocktail or super heavy leads, resulting in the average soldier being able to just about drop them at his feet, run off, and hope someone was chasing him at a particularly unfortunate distance.

My last word on this game is it's pretty fun to play, but there are games out there that are better and far cheaper. I'd recommend Star Wars Battlefront II over Frontlines, but what the hell, you're all going to give Frontlines a go anyway.