Frontlines: Fuel of War – Send in the Drones! Those laughy daffy Drones!

By GrathiusXR

©2008 Arthur Kotsopoulos

   The Xbox 360 is home to many First Person Shooters that have set the bar high in terms of intensity, game play, graphics, and overall design. While the latter of them dominating the online community and offline and offering similar end results, Kaos Studios sought to add and give the gamer a difference experience to your usual FPS.

32 players online, dedicated servers and drones to do all the human dirty work. Frontlines works on so many levels yet falls on others.

The game starts off with a nice little introduction into exactly what is happening in the year 2024. As the very few oil fields left begin to dry the Red Star Alliance move to secure what resources are left leading to small outbreaks that quickly turn into a full scale World War 3.

Leaving the rest of the storytelling behind after the introduction, in a quick cut scene, Red Star forces attack the helicopter your team ” The Stray Dogs ” are being transported in and you get kicked straight into the intense battles you will accustom yourself to during the course of the Single Player campaign.

At first you stand there thinking “Crap, what am I doing now??!!” but rest assured after a minute of gripping yourself with the controls you will be capturing Frontlines, killing the enemy and ensuring victory for the Western Coalition.

Many that have played battlefield will feel familiar with the core game play mechanic of Frontlines. Each campaign and multiplayer map have a set number of points that you must capture, and capturing the set points will progress your control of the map further and give you access to more weapons and equipment, until eventually you control the entire map.

To vary up capturing these points during Campaign mode, you will need to either stand next to a smoke beacon, plant C4 to blow up an enemy structure, or capture information off an enemy computer, all of which is fun and is a great constant intense battle and all but ultimately feels like it is just one big bot match, with no real sense of immersion as the games Halo 3, CoD4 and Bioshock provide. This is reinforced by the fact that your squad do not have names, and specific personalities, so during the breath taking moments that happen during cut scenes and the course of the game you won’t feel really attached to the characters.

Which is bad but at the same good, because remember this game is more based on multiplayer than single player, so the campaign is sort of tacked on as a little filler in the events happening in 2024.

Frontlines utilizes the Unreal 3 engine and I’m sure everyone knows the main problem this engine has that are apparent in 2 of the 360’s biggest RPG’s, that is Texture Pop ins. Frontlines suffers from them, whether there small or big you can feel them as the game tends to drop in frames for a second of two to load the textures.

Frontlines’ has the option to either lock the frame rate or not which I really do not understand why they put in as it is a useless option. If you put the option to unlock, the frame rates goes wild as the whole game is pretty much a lag-fest, while if you put it to lock the frame rate sticks to one frequent number and only drops in very rare occurrences.

Screen tearing is also apparent in the game, with it being noticeable half the time and not noticeable the other half, it doesn’t detract from the game. Some textures look a tad bland, with the constant brown color, and enemy soldiers all wear the exact same green clothes with either a red hat, or helmet to distinguish between them, and the draw distance of the game is not that great, as there is some fog that can be seen covering up most distant structures and mountains.

Soldiers in campaign mode seem to be able to take about 10-15 hits before they actually die which is abit strange as they do not look like they are wearing any special armor just green clothes, a good head shot will take them down in one hit. If you really know how to use your sources correctly in Frontlines you will almost not even be doing much work as at most points during the game there are drones you can use, which are the strongest point of campaign I must say as they are not only fun to use, but add a new way to take on a mission. Whether it’s the mini helicopter that can shoot rockets, a mini-gun drone, a explosive petrol car drone or a little air jet that looks like it just came out of the Terminator universe, you will have fn with them a lot.

The ability of ‘not’ being able to pick up enemy weapons means you will be using the exact same weapons through out the whole time you play campaign mode and you will get bored of using the same weapons after the 3^rd mission. Some vehicles including the tank and petrol car drone are really annoying to handle, and will require time and patience to get used to, priority of enemy to shoot you on sight instead of your allies, which is strange as if your on the roof of a building and pops out for 1 second the enemy directs their attention to you only not caring about your ally shooting at them.

Even though there is a hefty amount of bad that out weighs good this game shines in a few areas that are really important.

Having a 5.1 surround sound system will improve your experience of this game, with each gun sounding beastie, especially the standard machine gun that you are issued with at the beginning of every mission. The soundtrack is quite nice as well, with a sort of rock/metal feel to it, and also a few orchestral pieces to reflect the apocalyptic feel of the battlefield. One thing to note is the voice over for each character, while we have no real back story to them the characters seem to have nailed down the tone and sound of a soldier, and during cut scenes you will see and hear a few little speeches made by some soldiers which is great.

When you have finished your 8-10 hour play through of campaign mode you have 2 options, re do campaign mode and which will guarantee you finishing each mission in a totally different way than before as there are quite a few ways to complete a mission or moving on to the main reason this game was released multiplayer.

Now multiplayer is really the star of the game, with a huge 32 players able to battle it out on the frontlines in multiplayer. Yes, there was talk of 50 payer battles, but a few patches later and that will all be fixed up, so you are going have to get used to 32 – 16 player battles for the moment which isn’t a bad thing at all.

Now if you were to host your own online match on Frontlines you are actually restricted to a maximum player limit of 16, which is kind of low, but once there is a full room of 16 the battles get fierce, things blow up, helicopters, tanks jeeps are everywhere, drones are in the battlefield, and everything is just chaotic. Now with a 16 player match being fierce how do you expect a 32 player match to be? Just as intense and apocalyptic.

Many will think that after hearing 32 players straight away run and gun, well actually multiplayer on frontlines is more team based oriented. Each point will require a specific strategy to capture, and because of the different classes you can choose from and on top of that the role that can be chosen, you will see one person capturing a point while another sends in a drone to guard the front, one calling air strikes in case of enemy vehicles approaching, another repairing teammates tank/jeep.

For this to work there needs to be heavy communication, which is simple press up on the D-pad and from there a little menu pops up allowing you to add members from your team to your squad so that you can talk between who ever you have added which is good, but you need to hope your teammates have a microphone, as if they don’t the team base play will go down the gutter and then you will really be doing all the hard work yourself while your team does their own thing. When the point is captured and you die straight after capturing it you are given the option of redeploying into the battlefield at either the standard points in your base or also the point you just captured which means you will never really be out of the action for more than 10 seconds.

Off the bat there are 9 maps in total to choose from, with a few maps being for matches with 8+ players, 16+ players and 32+ players. So you won’t be repeating the same map twice in a row. The 24+ player maps is where the real fun begins in multiplayer, as they are vehicle based, and this opens up all doors of opportunity. One map will see you flying helicopters, air fighter jets, anti-air tanks, jeeps and tanks, with the 8+ maps will see you restricted to getting to objectives on foot or in a jeep.

Despite the problems Frontlines has, campaign mode being short, multiplayer is the real gem which works really well, and offers a unique experience with 60 weapons at your disposal in terms of guns, vehicles and air strikes, add a few updates to enable the 50 players matches, Australian Dedicated servers and the graphical errors the game has, new maps and game modes through DLC, I can see this game being a force to be reckoned with its online multiplayer in the long run.

7.7/10

©2008 Arthur Kotsopoulos