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Frontlines: Fuel of War
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 23rd March 2008
Multiplayer
And so it comes to this, the focus of the game and unfortunately one of the most disappointing parts of the entire experience – but we’ll get to that in a paragraph or two.Multiplayer in Frontlines is exactly what you’d expect from a modern class-based game. There are a series of soldier types to choose from – snipers, heavy assault, anti-vehicle and so on – and each one has a different load-out of weapons to start with.
Players can also choose a specific role in the game to slot themselves into to get extra bonuses and weapons that level up with experience. These roles are designed to complement the players’ style and allow them a specialty on the battlefield. There’s EMP tech for example which can be used to protect areas of play from vehicles that pass by, or artillery which can be used to call in different types of air strike on a target.
While the artillery option is perhaps the best choice for beginners and is maybe just a little bit unbalanced, our favourite was the Drone tech role. This gives a player different types of remotely controlled weaponry that they can use to safely attack enemies.
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Suicidal RC helicopters and cars are great for taking down tanks or flushing out snipers and the fact that players can switch between drone and player control at any point is a thoughtful addition. If you send your helicopter drone too far and it loses signal then you can switch back to controlling your avatar, move him closer and resume piloting your robotic toy.
The levels on offer in multiplayer are all pretty good too, offering a wide and balanced selection of vehicles and styles for players to take advantage of. There’s support for up to 64 players too which is great, though 30 seemed to be the most common group size.
So, what’s wrong with the multiplayer then? Well, to be honest, it just feels a little dull and plain. The levels are all interesting enough on paper, but in actual gameplay they very quickly get dull and the game artists don’t seem to have been comfortable with any other colour than brown.
The array of weapons and roles on offer here too is a little boring because, other than the drones, they all feel very generic and staid. Nothing ever feels particularly inspired or gripping and even the frontline mechanic the game is built around, which sees player control shifting as teams advance on enemies, isn’t anywhere near as innovative as it might sound. You could play the game to death without ever seeing why anyone chose to label it as revolutionary.
The interface for choosing servers could do with a little tweaking if you ask me as well. There’s nothing really wrong with it as it gives you all the basic filters and so on that you might need, but tidying the menus up and making everything a little more friendly would have helped soften the blow of the woefully generic reality.
Conclusion
If I was to say that Frontlines: Fuel of War disappointed me then you’d probably get the wrong idea, so I won’t say that. But it kind of did.You see, Frontlines isn’t a bad game at all. It’s actually quite a good game. There’s a good balance to everything and the game
always makes it possible to salvage victory from the jaws of defeat if you have a good understanding of where to put your tanks and helicopters. If you get a group of people working together then it can take on an enjoyably military feel, especially with the inclusion of artillery and airstrikes.However, with the history behind Frontlines of the boy-wonder modders who’ve struck the big time, we have to admit we were hoping for something a little more interesting. Kaos Studios is a developer built on a team of amateur modders from outside the industry, so the logical if misplaced hope is that bringing them within the industry could lead to a few interesting and new ideas.
But that hasn’t happened. Instead, the result is that Kaos has used their knowledge of how games are played to create a well-balanced shooter. What they haven’t really done is introduce any fundamentally new ideas. There’s nothing here to set Frontlines apart from any other game like it on the market – in fact, it feels very, very similar to Enemy Territory: Quake Wars pretty much all the way through. So, while the game itself isn’t flawed in any major way, it doesn’t really do anything to stand out in the crowd either.
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