Yay, time for game reviews. Today I plan on reviewing the following:

Frontlines: Fuel of War

And to start, Frontlines: Fuel of War, or FFOW. Frontlines was created by Kaos Studios, formally Trauma Studios, developers of the Desert Combat modification for Battlefield 1942. The modification transformed the World War II shooter, 1942, into a modern combat setting. The mod was acclaimed for the sheer quality and effort put into it. Frontlines was the team's first profitable project, and I must say, it is excellent.

Frontlines is probably best explained as the consensual, planned, and prepared for love child of Battlfield and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. Now the Kaos Studios have spent their fair share of time with the Battlefield series, creating the highly succesful and loved Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942, even providing the team input on Battlefield 2: Modern Combat. Even so, Frontlines is an offering I wouldn't expect to come from a team of mod makers, it's a game that I would, in fact, expect to see be created by a very experienced studio such as DICE (who made and makes the Battlefield series) or Epic Games (Unreal Tournament III, and Gears of War).

Onto the game! I shall be reviewing only the MULTIPLAYER gameplay, since everyone knows the singleplayer story/campaign mode of most first person shooters is a joke (save Crysis, Deus Ex, Halo and a few others [being I think Gears of War was third person was it not?]). Although I did play a bit of this one, story's not bad but it's really just linear bot fights. So, Multiplayer.

As to the offering of vehicles, so far I have counted 6 or 7 drivable vehicles per side. As for the weapons, there's 5-6 classes, each get a special primary firearm and a handgun (always the same per side) so there's about 14 firearms, 7 per side. Then they offer the role system, there's Drone which grants you a flying or driving drone. The Drone is somewhat like an RC Car with radar, explosives and then there's one with a minigun and one with mortars. There is also an Air role where you allowed to call in air strikes, the EMP role gives you control of EMP devices to disable vehicles and the Ground Support roles lets you repair vehicles.

The gameplay itself is fairly average for a FPS game, click, shoot, kill, repeat. Each primary weapon has an ironsight although the pistol lacks one. Using V you can perform a melee attack and you have near unlimited sprint. But why I lack the game so much is the sense of action, the way explosions seem to always be happening. Part of this may be because the helicopters can shoot 5 missiles in less than a second and be done reloading in 2 or 3 seconds. Or that tanks are somewhat inaccurate so you nearly recreates that scene from IronMan every now and then.

Another cool thing is the fact that certain elements of the environment are destructible, mainly concrete barricades and light metal structures. Now no one really hides behind these, they use buildings, but that doesn't take the fun out of running over barricades with a tank. It makes the tank feel... tankier...

I guess that there's not much to say about the gameplay, it's Battlefield 2 in GRAWs environment. Except with more detail (like I said, arms in the vehicle and a dynamic minimap and speed-guage also in the vehicle), and way, way more realistic action.

In the end I highly recommend the game to any fan of Battlefield.