Frontlines: Fuel Of War

by Ashley Coomer - 2008/02/16 6:27am

When it comes to realistically recreating war in videogames, Battlefield is the king. Everything about the series is what we imagine war to be like: heavy bulking weapons, taking a lot of cover and only advancing when the time is right. What do you do when the opposition is bettering your movements? You fight back! Kaos Studios isn’t going to give up without a fight either, in Frontlines: Fuel Of War, the developer’s very own take on the Battlefield series.

The thing Kaos wants you to buy into with Frontlines is the story. Set in 2024, a war is waging between two rival factions, the Western Coalition Army – the United States and Europe – and the Red Star Alliance – Russia and China – and as you might have gathered from the title of the game, it’s all over the precious fuels of the world. Does this ring a bell? If you’re aware of what’s going on in the world and the videogames industry right now, then it’s bound to. Let’s make something crystal clear from the beginning, Frontlines: Fuel Of War doesn’t score any points for originality, at least where its story is concerned.

We’ve recently been hands-on with the game and we’re proud to announce it has plenty of ideas of its own. The mission we played featured shooting and driving sections, giving us a taste of what to expect. Only seconds after the loading screen we and a small group of soldiers were dumped on the ground by a helicopter, to join our forces who were holding out for us to arrive. Up the road ahead we got to see how the combat works. In some ways, it’s comparable (though insignificantly) to that of Ghost Recon only in first-person, with enemies bearing a red target. Intense is the best word to describe it – enemies drop with only a few shots, but at the same time, there are a lot of them. This is touted around in most previews of upcoming shooters these days, but there really are a lot of ways to go about flushing out the opposition. You can fight on the ground, let your men do most of the work, or as we found to be best, climb a ladder to a roof and snipe the enemies previously hard to hit.



Further adding to the realism involved, the AI isn’t scripted which goes to make each encounter distinct. It would appear that enemies do everything they can to make your job hard by putting up one hell of a fight. Instead of one enemy popping out at a time, they will move across the map, go on roofs and try to get into flanking positions. It really is shocking the lengths they will go to in order to, well, not drop dead.

The overall mission structure in Frontlines is easy to understand, thankfully. Missions are split up into objectives you must capture, some of them involving taking areas, others to destroy weapons preventing you from going further. As an example, after taking the first outside area, we needed to remove a tank before we could go on. Down a side-alley were some enemies lurking around… obviously we did justice by making them eat lead, and then found a rocket launcher by a container. Well hello! We’ll leave it to you to guess what we used the rocket launcher for.

Later on in the level, after completing numerous objectives, including the destruction of a rooftop-mounted gun, we were introduced to several forms of vehicular combat. First of all were the miniature vehicles. These remote-controlled ‘toys’ can bring all sorts of pain to the enemy, within a certain range. We’re told the arsenal in the full game will include planes and helicopters, but for now we had a car. Let’s face it, this is a war game – Kaos didn’t place these little vehicles in the game to give the boys a break. No, instead we found out that these can be detonated. Perfect! After speeding it round a corner and watching as an enemy looked confused, we hit the detonate button. Hey, he was a bad guy!



The next type of vehicle we got to play around with was on a much larger scale. As a flare was thrown into some empty ground it was only a natural assumption this was the end of the level, rather soon, but there you go. It was only when the helicopter failed to land on the ground that we realised it wasn’t over at all. Tanks were dropped from a great height as we watched in awe. The following scene saw us clearing the area of enemy vehicles to make things easier for later on, while fellow troops proceeded on foot to a more built-up nearby area to make the opposition extinct. Soon afterwards our hands-on time with the game came to a close, and while we loved the single-player, that was just breaking the surface of Fuel Of War’s box of treats.

It’s obvious the multiplayer is going to be the star of the show when the game is released. Sadly we didn’t get the time to go hands-on with the online side of things but we know all about it. Drawing comparisons to Battlefield in many ways, you’ll need to pick a class and kick some ass! The big incentive to play multiplayer will come from the scope it allows, though. The maximum amount of players will be clocking in at 50, without a hint of lag in sight. How come? Why, THQ is hosting dedicated servers for the game, of course!

The cynic inside us wants to scream out about the size of the maps in contrast to the amount of players that will be in a full game. The maps are big, sure, but nothing spectacular, and we have to worry that things will get too hectic at times in the game. We’re all for a glut of chaos – this is a war game, after all – but there’s only so much hell to make before it has a negative impact on the experience. Still, on the bright side there will be a host of cool features in Frontlines: Fuel Of War’s online side; it’s guaranteed to be good as it uses the same mechanics as the single-player combat, with added humans! Something else fulfilling our hope is vehicles being taken online. There’s nothing to make your adrenaline kick like a helicopter careering to the ground in flames and watching enemies die!



When it comes down to the crunch Frontlines is bound to be compared to Battlefield in the same way that any game of Grand Theft Auto’s ilk is immediately branded a clone. You’ve got to hand it to the guys at Kaos Studios, though, they know how to capture the feeling of war as we know it. Originality doesn’t mean everything and this is the 21st century, where new ideas are about as easy to find as a giant ape on top of the Empire State Building. Oh, wait, that’s been done before!