Frontlines: Fuel of War
In a desperate, near future setting where controlling the planet's depleting fossil resources determines the ultimate fate of civilization. A global war for oil is being waged between two superpowers, the Western Coalition (US/EU) and the Red Star Alliance (Russia/China), and players will be instrumental in determining how the war is waged -- and won.
ESRB Rated T for Teen
Frontlines: Fuel of War Accessories
 Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2
Far Cry 2
Turning Point: Fall of Liberty
Crysis Warhead
Crysis
Call of Duty: World at War
Gears of War
Medal of Honor Airborne
World In Conflict
Frontlines: Fuel of War Reviews
It's open field, but with specific objectives, so it leads you along without a lot of need for thought (which is exactly what I like). You can't save your game and it doesn't overtly tell you when the game has been saved automatically, but objectives come in groups of three or four, and you usually need to accomplish them all before it saves your progress. The variety of weapons was not as great as some games, but some of the weapons were very innovative. I've never had that much hand-eye coordination. The number of respawns varies according to the difficulty of the current objectives. haha.
I play games mostly in single player mode, so this review is from that perspective. Overall, I thought this was an entertaining shooter without a lot of complexity or a long learning curve. I didn't run out of ammo very often. In any case, I had all the other graphics settings turned to max except motion blur which I just didn't like.
Maybe someone raised on computer games would have no trouble. I tried it twice and gave up. Graphics were detailed and sound was good. I have a 3GHz dual core CPU and two 8800GTS 512 graphics cards. While I usually hate not being able to save, I didn't find it to be a serious detractor from this game. You can respawn (referred to as "redeploy") a specific number of times before you have to start over on a group of objectives. And, you can carry it all at once.
I played this game right after having played Quake Wars Enemy Territory and had also recently played UT3. You can't pick up enemy weapons, but there are ammunition dumps at reasonable intervals. In the web forums people were saying to turn off the "Foliage" which seemed to improve things. There are a few types of ground based vehicles which are pretty typical. UT3 and QW came across (to me, anyway) as obvious arena style games whereas Frontlines compares well with the Call of Duty and Medal of Honor games.
Movements were reliable and easy, but I did get stuck once and had to "redeploy". Anyway, comparing this with the single player action of UT3 and Quake Wars (which also target the multiplayer market), I'd definitely give Frontlines a thumbs up. Besides the usual weapons there are flying drones, robotic ground based crawlers, demolition charges, and anti-personnel turrets that you can deploy.
The tank is fun and there is something like a Bradley which is also pretty cool. I love that. There is a pistol, assault rifle, grenade launcher, sniper rifle and a rocket launcher.
You won't have to repeatedly refer to the manual to figure out how stuff works. Even with that power, it seemed a bit sluggish at first when I was trying to aim accurately in a hurry. Then there's the helicopter.
I found Frontlines to be well designed, smooth, and quite enjoyable even for a single player. Then I turned it back up again, things were still pretty good for some reason.
Just make sure you read the system Requirements. Graphics are really good, but the lowest setting possible still requires a fast machine. Overall, worth the money. Great game, fast action, multiple ways to combat enemies. It takes alot of space and requires alot of memory {RAM}, to work properly. Good for experienced or novice users.
My other rig though better than my personal rig would not play it at all.mmmmmmmmm. I would wait for the price to come down though. My personal rig ran it fine in SP but everytime I tried to get online it would crash or freeze up or just couldn't coonect to a server though game was patched to most recent. for the most part the game is fun and the storyline is pretty good, but, make sure your rig can take it.
Logging on takes forever, as does populating the server browser. The maps are too small for the number of players and spawn camping sometimes makes it nearly impossible to even spawn much less play. The online version has a lot of problems. The single player version is excellent. The game doesn't even have a joystick feature. Great weapons, excellent graphics and quality AI. It seems obvious to me that the game was designed for console play with the PC version added as an afterthought.
But even with the cool tools and weapons available, the multiplayer is not that good. This game is what BF2142 should have been and what it should have looked like (beautiful graphics). The single player did have nice touches that made it a little more than just a multiplayer with bots, but it still felt like it during gameplay. Multiplayer is much more fun because there is no more mediocre artificial intelligence. There are many points in the game that were not addressed, that are still lacking. But even with those changes, COD4 is still not a "team" based game. 2.
Squad system isn't as natural as BF2, and you don't benefit as well in a team as you did in BF2. 3. The server browser sucks. Let us not talk about the single player because it is just a bunch of bots following you around in a multiplayer type fashion. It is slow, shows little stats of the server or the players on the server. Air vehicles are too difficult to control, and there was no joystick support. If you already have Call of Duty 4, I would stick to it. Although this game is beautiful and has a great concept, it lacks certain polish that would make it a very good game.
There are some multiplayer mods for COD4 that emphasize team based objectives and even incorporate some things like healing teammates. 1. No place to direct connect using an IP address. The game does incorporate new gadgets and styles of play that set it apart from almost all FPS multiplayer games on the market. Weapon damage is unbalanced and usually weak resulting in dependence on grenade launchers constantly being used for close quarters.
Overall, if like BF2 and BF2142, you will probably enjoy this. However, the game has a lot of incentives for people not in the same squad to work together. This becomes almost silly in parts where someone shoot a grenade launcher 2m in front of them and they do not die from it. 4.
|
