Frontlines: Fuel of War
Posted By: Troy (Former Staff) on Nov 06 2008

Originally Reviewed On: 03/15/2008

THQ has been at the top of their game with many of their PC titles being “must haves” in any gamers collection. With their recent track record, hopes could only be high for their game Frontlines: Fuel of War. Sadly this game is not a powerhouse like many of their recent games. While still fun, it is hard to see this game as being a top selling game. 

Right off, anyone that has played the Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter games will be bit skeptical of this when they first see it sitting on the store shelf. The man depicted on the cover looks very similar to the soldiers from the Ghost Recon: AW series. This really should have no bearing on your decision of purchasing this game, because it is in no way a clone of that series. Frontlines plays more like a Battlefield style game. Multiplayer matches consist of players fighting to gain control of points on the map which, once captured, will allow a team to move onto the next series of points to dominate the field. Maps can vary from a design created to support eight players to one that will support sixty-four.

Available on each map are an assortment of vehicles that will make the trip across map a little more bearable. With games in the past such as Battlefield and other games similar to it, players have complained about being killed and then having to run a long distance back to the battle only to be killed quickly and have to make the run again. Luckily, from my experiences with Frontlines: FoW I have encountered plenty of combat between the points to keep the monotony at bay while running to my objective.

The vehicles in the game control rather well, and the most satisfying is the helicopter. Many games have implemented horrible control schemes and designs for helicopters in the past and thanks to the designers, these handle like a dream. The tanks are a little irritating at times but are a powerful weapon since the weapons needed to destroy them in a quick fight are normally left behind because they are nearly useless when fighting other foot soldiers. So, expect that if you run across a tank while carrying an SMG or rifle that you will be dropped before you can empty a clip.

There are other ways to take care of these armored behemoths and they come in the forms of classes that you can play in multiplayer games. Frontlines: FoW combines the gameplay styles of the recent Call of Duty 4 and the Battlefield series by allowing players to select a weapons layout as well as choose a class, or Roles as the designers call it, to play on the field. The roles available are Ground Support, EMP Tech, Drone Tech and Air Support. Ground Support is where players at the lowest rank will be able to repair vehicles they comes across on the field as well as passively repairing any vehicle they currently occupy. The second rank gets divided between the two different factions in the game, where the Coalition players will be able to drop a swivel-mounted rapid-fire grenade launcher to deal damage to enemy units and vehicles. The Red Star faction will be able to place a Mini-gun instead of the grenade launcher. At the third rank of the ground support role, soldiers gain access to a Rail gun for Coalition or a Portable Sentry gun for Red Star soldiers. These two different final tier weapons for the Ground Support role are vastly unbalanced since one provides a devastating attack against vehicles while the other destroys foot soldiers.

The EMP Tech role gives access, at it\'s first rank, to enemy tracking and disruption. This basically allows the soldier to be hidden from enemy radar as well as being able to spot the positions of enemy drones, drone operators, and deployed EMP devices. Which brings us to the second rank in the EMP Tech role. Rank 2 gives soldiers an EMP Rocket that will disable enemy vehicles. The rockets are unguided but do have a \'sense\' of vehicles in their path and will detonate nearby to disrupt them. At the third rank of EMP Tech, players get access to a deployable EMP generator that will send out a disruptive pulse to disable all vehicles and drones in the area as well as preventing air strikes in a large radius in the area.

The Drone Tech role is something that brings a refreshing new style of play to the FPS genre. Drone Techs can deploy hovering drones that will scout enemy locations and relay it to all allied players. The hover drone can also be remotely detonated to help clear out bunkered enemies. At second rank you can release an assault drone or tiger runner. These drones are ground-based units, where the assault drone has a mini-gun attachment and the tiger runner has C4 to detonate under enemy vehicles. These, once again, are faction based. Third rank gives the Coalition drone techs a mortar drone which has a devastating attack against enemy vehicles while the Red Star gain access to a Tiger Claw which is a mini helicopter armed with deadly rocket pods used against light vehicles and infantry.

Air Support Techs will give you the ability to take out many different enemies from a distance. First rank gives the Precision Air Strike which is used to remove sentry weapons, single vehicles and infantry. Second rank brings out the Cluster Bomb and Carpet Bomb air strikes to obliterate enemy infantry and vehicles. With the final rank, players get access to the Gryphon Gunship or a Fuel Air Bomb. The gunship will fire a 20mm mini-gun and 105mm MCH heavy artillery cannon. Once the strike has been called, the tech will be able to adjust the aim of it to destroy the enemies as they move. The Red Star\'s Fuel Air Bomb is the largest non-nuclear explosive device so expect it to cause a large amount of destruction.

The Roles all bring different advantages to the field and if used by skilled players can turn the battle in your favor. These will be the biggest ways to have an affect on the battle because the guns are just poorly balanced. With the high fire weapons, you will have to unload what seems like a large amount of rounds into an enemy soldier to even kill them. The sniper rifle will kill in one shot to the head or two to anywhere else on the body. The multiplayer overall seems to suffer from many balance issues which hopefully can be corrected in future updates, if the game doesn\'t make it\'s way to the cemetery before that.

Graphically, Fuels of War has a comical feel during the cutscenes as it doesn\'t look over the top realistic but doesn\'t look like something from Nickelodeon. Some of the most impressive visuals come in the single player of the game which will probably be overlooked by many players as this game seems to be pushed as a multiplayer game. The game developers, in what I still say is a wise choice, avoided Direct X 10 and stuck with 9 for Frontlines. While DX10 can do amazing things, DX9 is more compatible with the mass of the market of gamers.

Some of the nice features of the graphics is the fact that you can see the damage done to buildings. If you decide to play through the single player, you will get a smile on your face the first time you send in a hover drone to an enemy room and blow it up killing all the enemies inside as well as blowing bits of the walls away. Even smaller objects such as sandbags used for cover can be blown away by even the Assault drone. This effects on the way players will have to use cover against different enemies.

Overall, the in game graphics are very eye-catching while the the facial animations during cutscenes have a Pixar type feel.

I\'m going to give this a hidden gem rating. I feel that the single player campaign will be a hidden gem of this game. While it isn\'t on an epic scale and may not be comparable to the story in games such as Call of Duty 4, the campaign is a lot of fun.

Basically the story plays out with you as a soldier for the Coalition to defend some of the last oil fields left in the world under your factions control. Along for the ride with your squad is a press reporter that claims he will make your team heroes. Things rapidly go awry as your transport helicopter is attacked as you arrive at your post. So, right from the start you are thrown headfirst into a campaign of intense battles across many maps.

The one downside to the single player is that it is rather short. Although while playing through it, I would get so caught up in the game that I actually lost track of time and it seemed like longer. That\'s why I give this a hidden gem award. Any game that can give you such an immersive experience deserves to be mentioned. Between the multiplayer and single player, I would have to say that the single player experience was more fun. In many cases I would almost put money down that the AI in single player are more intelligent then the people playing multiplayer.

 Overall, Frontlines: Fuel of War is worth picking up if not for the energetic Single Player campaign then for the possibility of having a great multiplayer game that you can play with a few friends or with a large group of strangers over the internet. With updates, the multiplayer can become very balanced and further enhance what is already a fun game to play.