Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Keith Schleicher

Gas prices seem to be going up with no end in sight.  You would think that people would be allowed to drill where oil deposits have been found and start research on alternative fuels, but that wouldn’t make sense in a video game.  Two sides have to form coalitions and battle each other, sabotaging supplies, and causing oil prices to go even higher.  This is the storyline behind Frontlines: Fuel of War.

In Frontlines, prices have skyrocketed to almost $20 for a gallon of gas.  Disease has spread in underdeveloped nations.  You are a member of the Western Coalition, formed by countries like the USA and England after Russia and China have formed the Red Star Alliance.  No mention is made of which side the Arab nations are on. The two sides are in a constant struggle to get oil and sabotage the supplies of the opposing faction.

Frontlines features the use of the Unreal Engine 3, making this shooter look very good.  The characters’ movements look natural, and the character models have a nice amount of detail to them.  The rag-doll physics don’t disappoint either, with enemies falling down stairs or off the side of a building.  Impressive shots show the hats of the soldiers fly off while the weapon is dropped.

While the characters look nice, both sides look very similar to each other.  It’s difficult to differentiate who is on which side from a far distance.  You do have some kind of computer that assists you by showing you where the enemies have hidden, but more visual clues would have been appreciated.

Vehicles make their way into Frontlines, and they are menacing.  A tank can withstand a pounding.  Grenades exploding underneath a tank leave a small explosion but no damage to a tank.  Get a rocket launcher though and the rocket will leave a small trail of smoke and cause the tank to explode in several pieces.  Even smaller explosions give a nice burst.

The levels are a little varied, but a lot of the time you’ll be out in the desert.  This makes the levels feel the same with similar buildings.  Even the characters in your squad all have very similar facial features.  That isn’t to say that Frontlines doesn’t look good, but more could have been accomplished with the Unreal Engine 3.

The soundtrack in Frontlines features a guitar-laden metal soundtrack.  The soundtrack runs throughout the game constantly.  While it does have energy behind it, it can start to sound the same after a while.  It is nice to hear the soundtrack throughout the game as opposed to just in the menu or loading screens.

The weapons have sufficient punch behind them.  The smaller weapons give a small shot, but shooting a rocket launcher or exploding a C4 cartridge really makes you feel the resulting carnage.

There is a lot of voice acting in Frontlines.  Unfortunately, almost all of the voice acting is bad.  It feels very cheesy, but it doesn’t get into a campy area where it might have been a bit more amusing.  It’s really disappointing how bad the quality of the voice acting is.

Shooters come with fairly standard controls these days, and Frontlines is no exception. The left stick controls movement, the right stick aims, and pushing the left stick changes your stance from standing to crouching to prone.  Pushing on the right stick zooms your aim.  The right trigger and left trigger are your primary and secondary weapons fires, respectively.  Using A jumps, B triggers a melee attack, X interacts with objects, and Y changes your weapon.  The right bumper sprints, while the left bumper reloads your weapon or picks up a drone.  There are pretty standard while you are on foot.  The controls during the on-foot sections are tight.

The problems arise when you try to control vehicles, especially a turreted one like a tank.  If you thought controlling vehicles like the Warthog in Halo was difficult, don’t bother picking up Frontlines.  The driving of the vehicles uses the left stick for moving forward and backwards, as well as turning.  Trying to squeeze through some of the areas you need to go into is an exercise in frustration.  You’ll end up going in reverse and forward over and over to get into some tight spots.  I never really felt like I was in complete control of any vehicle I piloted.

Frontlines has you fighting as a soldier in the Western Coalition against the Red Star Alliance.  While the story is more unique than one army fighting another for supremacy, it really doesn’t add much to the game.  While there is a long introduction (although not as long as a Xenosaga or Metal Gear Solid cutscene), the story isn’t really touched on later in the game.  You get cutscenes throughout the game, but they don’t feel like they are a part of a cohesive story.

There are eight missions in the game, but each mission is made up of several parts.  This is nice because you don’t need to complete a mission or worry about losing your progress in that mission even if you made it to a specific checkpoint.   While there are specific points where Frontlines saves in each level, the system works much better than other games in the genre.

What also makes the game interesting is that you start with a certain set of objectives in a level.  Once those are completed, a different set of objectives will be given to you instead of going to a mission summary screen and moving to the next mission.  This makes it feel like you are fighting in a prolonged conflict as well.  While you might think that this makes the missions longer, the game is very short.  I completed about half of it in a casual playthrough my first time through.

When you die you don’t automatically restart from the last checkpoint.  Instead you have the option to redeploy with a different weapon loadout.  This is useful if you need to change your strategy for completing a mission.  Let’s say you have to fight against a large group of tanks at the end of a level and you can’t find any working tanks to hijack and go up against them.  Redeploy with a rocket launcher and you will be all set.  The different weapon loadouts include Assault, Heavy Assault, Sniper, Anti-vehicle, Special Operations, and Close Combat.  Also, when you redeploy the enemies you’ve already killed don’t come back.  Unfortunately, this does make the game almost too easy to complete.

While you do have a HUD to tell you your current ammo and a map to show your objectives, the HUD is almost completely useless.  If you thought reading the text in Dead Rising was difficult without an HDTV, the text in Frontlines is even worse.  There were some items that I couldn’t read without being five feet away from my 46” HDTV.  If a HUD is going to be a part of the screen, the information should be useful and readable.

As you go through the levels, you occasionally find drones.  You can find a hovercraft-like drone and a ground vehicle.  These vehicles can be used to scope out a new area, but you’ll probably use it to go into an area heavily populated by enemies and then let it explode.  It seemed like enemies would immediately notice when drones were heading towards them and start shooting at it.  Most of the time you can get it close enough to explode and take out a few enemies in one swipe.  Unfortunately the drones feel like they are underutilized in the game.  You don’t find very many and you feel like you should be able to do more with them.

Frontlines wants you to feel like a part of a squad, so most missions you have a set of teammates that fight along side of you.  Your teammates act pretty stupid sometimes.  After going up a flight of stairs to complete an objective, I had to run around a teammate who kept on trying to block me as I was trying to go back down the stairway.  It didn’t help that there were a couple of times when I got stuck in the environment as well.

Frontlines continues the trend of short shooters.  You’ll be able to complete it in a weekend rental without too much issue unless you want to replay missions on a different difficulty.  The campaign shouldn’t take you more than eight hours to complete.

There is one single multiplayer game type available, and while this sounds like it could be detrimental, it is massive in scope and has a bit of originality to it.  In the multiplayer mode you have a map that you try to control by capturing objectives along a frontline.  Once you capture an objective the frontline gets moved into the opponent’s territory.  You can’t capture objectives behind the frontline though, so you don’t want to get too far ahead of yourself.  You win by either capturing all of the checkpoints on the map or when the opponent’s reinforcement points have been depleted.

You can set up squads similar to clans in the multiplayer.  Squads are made up of a group of four players.  One of those players is assigned as a squad commander who can use squad commands of Attack, Defend, and Move.  This emphasizes the use of teamwork amongst your squad.

Each member of the squad can be assigned a different loadout depending on their style.  The Assualt payload starts out with an assault rifle with grenade launcher attachment, pistol, and frag grenades.  The Heavy Assault payload starts out with the heavy assault rifle, pistol, and frag grenades.  The Sniper starts with a sniper rifle, pistol, and frag grenades.  The Anti-vehicle loadout has a rocket launcher, pistol, and anti-vehicle landmines.  Playing as Special Operations gives you sub-machine guns, a pistol, and C4 charges.  Finally, the Close Combat loadout gives you a shotgun, pistol, and frag grenades.  While these different loadouts are nice to have, they are all very similar.  More differentiation would have made these loadouts more interesting.
 
You also have roles that you can add to your character.  They include ground support, EMP technician, drone technician, and air support.  Adding these roles to the weapons loadout can add a little more variety to the multiplayer.  Add the fact that you can have 50 people playing online at the same time and the multiplayer seems huge.

There are a lot of good ideas contained in Frontlines: Fuel of War, but their execution just seems to make the game feel average.  Technical glitches and the HUD don’t help matters.  If these ideas could be expanded on, a sequel could be a great addition to your game library.  Unfortunately, in this sea of “me too” shooters, Frontlines doesn’t do enough to stand out of the crowd.

Gaming Trend Score

72

1. Graphics: 86
2. Audio: 78
3. Controls: 70
4. Gameplay: 66
5. Value/Replay: 68
6. OVERALL:72