Frontlines: Fuel of War multiplayer hands on
posted:
1/18/2008 12:00:00 AM
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Frontline: Fuel of War
I’ll admit that my first experience with Frontlines: Fuel of War wasn’t an overly positive one. I was killing time between appointments at PAX and wandered over to the THQ booth to check the game out. I played an early beta of what looks to be the first level of the game and while it wasn’t bad it didn’t exactly light my world on fire. Fast forward a few months and I have to say that I’m starting to get a little excited about the game. The new demo on Xbox Live is step above what was shown at PAX and after spending some quality time with the multiplayer portion of the game I think there’s a chance the game could surprise some people.
The multiplayer portion of the game will be familiar to fans of the Battlefield series in that you and your team try to control capture points around the map. The Frontlines twist is that the capture points are linked so that a team has to capture a set of points to move the front of the battle forward or backwards. It’s actually a decent system that forces you to use a little more teamwork as you have to attack and defend the points in order to win the game.
The second big twist is that while the game has six classes (Assault, Heavy Assault, Sniper, Anti-vehicle, Spec Ops, Close combat) there are four sub classes (called roles) that you can add on to create a better mix (Drones, Ground Support, Air Strikes, and EMP Tech). This allows you to further tailor the game to your liking. The roles are important because you can level them up to three levels during each round. For example the drones role starts with only the recon drone but as you progress you’ll gain access to the chain gun drone and the mortar drone. The role levels reset after each map change so you don’t have to worry about joining a server and getting overwhelmed by players who are already maxed out.
My primary load out for the press multiplayer session was a heavy assault with the drone roles. I would use the aerial drone to scout out ahead and identify enemies and then take out a few before I could get them in range. Then I’d flip over to the heavy machine gun and take them out the rest with my heavy machine gun. I also tried a heavy assault/air strike combo that would so something similar but with far less room for subtlety. I’m guessing a sniper/air strike combo might be a lot of fun but I’ll have to wait until the game ships to try it out further.
Like the Battlefield games you can form squads and then re-spawn on the squad leader after you die (assuming he isn't dead). My squads really didn’t work as well together as I would have liked but I think that was more of me wandering off to check out the cool stuff I could do with the drones. I did get a few commands from my squad leaders which are easy to see on screen.
The game uses the Unreal Engine 3 so the visuals are impressive (albeit with some texture pop-in that will hopefully get fixed before the game ships). What’s different about Frontlines is the folks at Kaos were able to work in more destructible environments than I’ve seen in other UE3 games. I was impressed that throwing grenades into some of the houses would blow chunks of the walls off allowing me to quickly dispatch those inside the building. There are also other examples of this as I saw fences getting blown down and road debris getting moved around when ordinance exploded around them. I’m kind of surprised THQ and Kaos aren’t banging this gong harder as it really adds a lot to the realism of the game.
The only real gripe I had about the game is that ground vehicles are a bit hard to steer and that the land based drones tend to get caught up on things on the ground (like dead bodies). I’m sure part of the vehicle issue is me getting used to the system but there were a few occasions when I just couldn’t get the vehicles to go where I wanted them to go. I’m guessing this will be fixed/tweaked before the game is released.
All told I spent about 90 minutes playing the game online today and I really enjoyed the experience. The game is fast, tight, and easy to get into. The drones are a lot of fun to play with and really add a lot to the game as you constantly have to be listening for them or you’ll find yourself dying over and over again. I still feel like I have a lot to learn about the classes but I think people who are looking to take a break from Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 are going to dig the multiplayer part of the Frontlines.
I would point out that I represented the site well by being the top scorer the first two rounds (see screenshot below). I'd say it was natural talent and skill that lead to my first place showings but I think it took the devs and other press sites just a little longer to get warmed up.
The multiplayer portion of the game will be familiar to fans of the Battlefield series in that you and your team try to control capture points around the map. The Frontlines twist is that the capture points are linked so that a team has to capture a set of points to move the front of the battle forward or backwards. It’s actually a decent system that forces you to use a little more teamwork as you have to attack and defend the points in order to win the game.
The second big twist is that while the game has six classes (Assault, Heavy Assault, Sniper, Anti-vehicle, Spec Ops, Close combat) there are four sub classes (called roles) that you can add on to create a better mix (Drones, Ground Support, Air Strikes, and EMP Tech). This allows you to further tailor the game to your liking. The roles are important because you can level them up to three levels during each round. For example the drones role starts with only the recon drone but as you progress you’ll gain access to the chain gun drone and the mortar drone. The role levels reset after each map change so you don’t have to worry about joining a server and getting overwhelmed by players who are already maxed out.
My primary load out for the press multiplayer session was a heavy assault with the drone roles. I would use the aerial drone to scout out ahead and identify enemies and then take out a few before I could get them in range. Then I’d flip over to the heavy machine gun and take them out the rest with my heavy machine gun. I also tried a heavy assault/air strike combo that would so something similar but with far less room for subtlety. I’m guessing a sniper/air strike combo might be a lot of fun but I’ll have to wait until the game ships to try it out further.
Like the Battlefield games you can form squads and then re-spawn on the squad leader after you die (assuming he isn't dead). My squads really didn’t work as well together as I would have liked but I think that was more of me wandering off to check out the cool stuff I could do with the drones. I did get a few commands from my squad leaders which are easy to see on screen.
The game uses the Unreal Engine 3 so the visuals are impressive (albeit with some texture pop-in that will hopefully get fixed before the game ships). What’s different about Frontlines is the folks at Kaos were able to work in more destructible environments than I’ve seen in other UE3 games. I was impressed that throwing grenades into some of the houses would blow chunks of the walls off allowing me to quickly dispatch those inside the building. There are also other examples of this as I saw fences getting blown down and road debris getting moved around when ordinance exploded around them. I’m kind of surprised THQ and Kaos aren’t banging this gong harder as it really adds a lot to the realism of the game.
The only real gripe I had about the game is that ground vehicles are a bit hard to steer and that the land based drones tend to get caught up on things on the ground (like dead bodies). I’m sure part of the vehicle issue is me getting used to the system but there were a few occasions when I just couldn’t get the vehicles to go where I wanted them to go. I’m guessing this will be fixed/tweaked before the game is released.
All told I spent about 90 minutes playing the game online today and I really enjoyed the experience. The game is fast, tight, and easy to get into. The drones are a lot of fun to play with and really add a lot to the game as you constantly have to be listening for them or you’ll find yourself dying over and over again. I still feel like I have a lot to learn about the classes but I think people who are looking to take a break from Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 are going to dig the multiplayer part of the Frontlines.
I would point out that I represented the site well by being the top scorer the first two rounds (see screenshot below). I'd say it was natural talent and skill that lead to my first place showings but I think it took the devs and other press sites just a little longer to get warmed up.
