I think I know what went wrong here. imagine the scenario In Kaos studio. There must be many different offices, imagine one belongs to a writer, maybe there are one or two writers, I don't know, but I doubt it. There must be many more offices for programmers, level designers, artists etc. Now The writer works away in his little office. He might have been given a brief by game designers. Possibly he might be giving the brief to the game designers but it doesn't feel that way.
The point is, it looks like he worked away on his little story while the tech people worked away on the game and the two were slotted together at the end. It could even be possible that these people don't work in the same building and might actually have never met in person.
Why do I have this theory? Well, there are missions, set in a distinct location, with objectives and a clear story like point. There are about 8 missions and each one seems to be set in a different game. The job of the writer seems to have been to come up with a scenario that all of these can fit into and link them all together with story cut scenes. The problem here is that the cut scenes are for the "short of attention span" and only last a minute at most. The characters in these cut scenes don't have enough time to imprint on us to care about them. Most of them are too generic to actually be called character rather than archetype.
While we are in the game these characters are absent and we only have generic grunts to assist us who have no real character whatsoever. This means to me that I could hardly learn the various characters names, nor did I want to because they showed up too infrequently.
In one scene the people who fight their way deep into the bowels of a missile silo to stop a missile being launched are left with only one option to stop it. By closing the silo doors it means that the nuke will launch inside the silo and be destroyed and them along with it as there is no time to get out. We see their demise from other characters point of view and are expected to be moved by their loss and sacrifice. I never even knew their names. I thought that the character I was controlling for the whole game was the same person? It was all a little too close to some scenes in Call of duty 4 for my liking anyway.
The writer did a good job on the whole universe of the game. We are asked to believe that once oil becomes scarce the whole world will degenerate into war for control of the remaining resources. The story seems to be suggesting that the russians and chinese have clubbed together against the rest of europe and America. Whatever has happened it seems that middle eastern powers seem to be incorporated into the alliance.
The irony of using so much of a dwindling resource to fight a world war isn't lost. The cut scenes suggest that rioting and loss of societal norms has become commonplace when cars run out of fuel and homes stop getting electricity, leading to disease and looting.
We are never shown any of this however. It is all narration from the Reporter who is tagging along with the stray dogs squad. The story takes the squad from routine defense duty where they are ambushed, to full scale war with the Russian/chinese coalition. The game takes us through many engagements until a full scale assault on Moscow ends the game.
I have criticisms about the total degeneration of society as portrayed in the game. I am sure that society would go through a dark time when fossil fuel runs low. However, I hope that alternative energy will play a bigger part and society will lose its shackles rather than eat itself. Still this is one alternate future, which is reasonably plausible. The crying shame it that the writers work might as well be about a different game than what we are playing here.
Gameplay mechanics
Aiming seems slightly dodgy using sniper rifle, seems to hit girders etc in the way when it shouldn't and doesn't kill instantly with a headshot.
At one point you are asked to do a stealth mission, however, there seems to be no way to go about the job stealthily. the first shot alerts the enemy. I don't really do stealthy anyway, maybe it was my mistake.
Take a bit of getting used to to aim with standard guns, clicking the stick to zoom seems to be necessary at first until you get used to the game. Something seems to make the game hard work on first play, which requires persistence and a learning curve that is just that bit too steep, first rule of gameplay should be that nothing irritates the player too much on the first level. You don't want them to get turned off and stop playing. Which for some might have happened with the demo of this game which game some time before release and didn't seem one pixel different from the finished game.
There are the usual fps conventions and weapons, guns, shotguns, rocket launchers, grenades. In addition there are many additional weapons. There are drones which allow you to charge into heavily guarded areas and run around in the open all guns blazing and take out a few soldiers without endangering yourself. There are three types of drone, robot remote guns on tracks, little helicopters or fast moving remote control tiny car bombs. There are also moveable turret emplacements with weapons like rail-guns. Enemies also have a few tricks, in the form of emp generators which keep vehicles out of a certain area until they are taken out.
The player can control a range of tanks and jeep type weapons with varying mounted weaponry. Helicopters are also used infrequently in the single player campaign.
The areas are large and open world, though this still feels very much like a corridor shooter. It's not, they just put all the objectives in a line instead of making you run for your money around the maps.
Good terrain and a realistic feel, areas are designed well for the type of conflict that is to take place in them. The missile base being particularly well designed, with its heavy fortifications and one main entrance leading down to a believable generator room and launch silo. Missions require the taking of certain areas as if it were a capture the flag multiplayer game or the destruction of certain features like generators or pumping stations. Various enemies and tanks are in the way. There is a limitless amount of them unless you keep pushing forwards as seen in games like call of duty instead of there being a certain amount of enemies in the map. Though once you push into the latter stages of an objective then once you shoot all the enemies at the objective none re-spawn. There are no boss fights at the end of each level you have big areas inside buildings with lots of enemies shooting from all sides.
The a.i. is typical of low end old school a.i. They stand in the open, run straight at you or just stand there in cover shooting and ducking. When they are in cover they pop up at timed intervals right into your waiting shots. Weight of numbers is their only real hope of getting you.
The game allows you 5 or so respawns per mission. Checkpoints are spaced well. When you run out of re-spawns you have to restart the mission from the start rather than the last checkpoint, which means going back a fair amount. However, you really only need those respawns to count on the last few missions even on the hardest difficulties.
The audio is adequate, with no really irritating music to speak of. The usual bangs and whistles with no problems with the mixing of the sound.
Graphically the game has an adequate engine which moves smoothly most of the time. the graphics are nothing that hasn't been seen before in a thousand other fps games. Deserts towns cities. The Moscow level shows the engine to be capable of grandeur but it's too little too late in the game. In short not bad, very average and nothing we haven't seen in countless other games.
Achievements are badly handled I completed the game on hard and was given 155 points. 50 of those were for playing a multiplayer game with two other people. Two of us against one poor guy who must have been playing it for the first time also. We won a flawless victory, probably by virtue of only seeing the guy once and blowing his brains out with a sniper rifle. Hence what should have been a hard as nails online achievement being relegated to a joke. I may as well have played on normal as the achievements were for normal for completing a level. To get the points mother-load you have to complete levels in a certain time limit or do it without dying or have a certain accuracy. All obtainable on easy if I could be bothered. I might do it sometime, but I am not in any hurry.
Multiplayer seemed mostly empty when I tried. Which is damning in itself. If a game can't keep a thriving online community then it's lost the battle before it started. If a couple of months after release it's hard to get enough players to fill a game then there is no impetus to return to the game.
Which is a shame, as with the large playing areas and variety of weapons and objectives the game could have been good. Shame it just doesn't have that popularity factor that Halo COD and BFBC have at present. Harshly put Battlefield imitators are put in the shade when the real Battlefield releases a new incarnation.
I can't really put my finger on what is wrong with this game, I enjoyed it, it seemed a little short. I would put my playing time at around 10 hours. Which actually was just long enough, any more and it would have been tiresome rather than gripping.
It's one of my little things. I don't want shooters like this to run to 80 hours of gameplay. Sure if multiplayer is your bag and you spend 80 hours on Frontlines in multiplayer then great. But single player campaigns that last more than 15 hours are usually full of padding levels. Halo 1 for example which seemed to go on for an eternity in that cartography level in very similar rooms.
The problem with Frontlines isn't that it's a bad game, it's just that it's very similar to the Battlefield games. We have seen it all before, and since it isn't better than those games then it doesn't have a lot to recommend it. Comparing it to the crop of shooters that came out around the same time as it, it was actually the best of the bunch. I am thinking of Turning Point, Conflict Denied Ops and Turok. Though I am basing that comparison on the demos of those games, which is all I have played of them.
Scoring
Graphics 7
Gameplay 7
Story 5
Level Design 8
A.i. 5
Total 6.4
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