Flaws in the single player game...
Anyhoo, install and patching issues aside, let’s look at the actual gameplay as I’d be willing to forgive all this hassle if Frontlines: Fuel of War is fun to play.Starting off in the single player campaign, you’re initially treated to a load of FMV to bring you up to speed with the story I describe previously, full of the doom and gloom of a world running out of oil. This ends up with your first mission being to secure two choke points before moving in to push the Red Star forces out of the area. This first mission is a very well disguised training mission, teaching you the usual controls of sprinting, crouching, reloading etc as well as a nifty weapon selection pop-up available at the press of the ‘Q’ button.
Click for larger imagePlayers of the Battlefield series from EA will be right at home as your AI squad move up alongside you, giving you covering fire, shouting commands to each other and generally being quite useful. One little trick I discovered early on is to sneak your way behind the enemy lines, usually by taking a detour from the main path, and through the magic of AI, letting your squad clear the enemy away between you and them as they fight their way to catch up with you. Once you’ve cleared out this first mission you’re then plonked into vehicles for the next and then you get your first remote drone to play with and so on and so on.
As a single player campaign, so far Frontlines: Fuel of War actually holds up better than Battlefield 2142. It feels more like a solo FPS with an AI squad than an offline version of a multiplayer game using bots instead of human players. This is a good thing. But there’s two major problems and for once, it’s not the AI that letting Frontlines: Fuel of War down… no, it’s the scripting.
Click for larger imageAt first, you’ll think everything is fine and dandy but after a little while you’ll notice that the enemy AI is totally ‘switch’ orientated. Unless you cross a specific place on the map, the AI is unreactive and will happily take any punishment you dish out from afar to the point of being destroyed without so much as moving. This becomes evident in the very first vehicle mission, (the second mission overall), where you can fire rockets at the opposition with near impunity, wiping out enemy vehicles as they just sit there.
Another problem is the aiming reticule on your weapons which for your starting assault rifle is so far off as to be useless. What happens is this: in the normal view you get a crosshair on the screen and the barrel of your weapon is in the bottom right corner. You fire and the bullets come from the bottom right of the screen, where your gun barrel is, and whizz to the centre of the crosshair. Fine.
Click for larger imageBut enter the scope mode and it all goes tits-up because instead of changing your view to look along the barrel of your weapon, you just get a slightly zoomed-in view with a scope reticule overlay. When you fire, the bullets still come from the bottom right of the screen meaning that they now hit slightly to the bottom right of the crosshair. THQ may argue that this is real-life modelling and scopes need zeroing in. Fine, but how many scopes are diagonally two feet away from the weapon they’re mounted on? This is a rifle scope, not a bleeding periscope!
But you may be tempted to forgive this foible and soldier on with Frontlines: Fuel of War as, provided you’re not too fussed on accuracy and promise yourself not to take advantage of the dozy AI, there’s a fair bit of fun to be had. Well, fun up until the tank mission which is where Frontlines: Fuel of War falls down so hard that it’d leave a dent in concrete.
Click for larger imageYes, thanks to dodgy scripting I’ve been able to progress no further than the middle of the tank mission as the game won’t recognise that I’ve killed all the tanks in that wave. I’ve slogged through the first three waves, I’ve driven all over the areas of the map I’m allowed to go to and there are no more enemies to be killed. But still I can’t progress any further as Frontlines: Fuel of War hasn’t noticed I’ve completed all the mission objectives.
I’ve restarted the mission three times, I’ve tried being cautious and destroying tanks from a distance, I’ve tried getting up close and blasting them from point blank range, all with no joy. My radar says there aren’t any targets left and yet if I move forwards beyond the line on my map I’m warned I’ll be court martialled and carrying on any further sees my health depleted and I’m eventually killed.
