Frontlines: Fuel of War Hands-on Preview

Story time with bit-tech

Musing on the topic later over burgers and beer, my fellow journalists and I decided that the one great thing about multiplayer games was that gamers often come out of a match with some great stories to tell.

The stories that are told, we realised as we shared many of our own, are nearly always about defeating the odds through a careful balance of teamwork and luck. Universally, every tale that was told in the aftermath of the match we played with THQ started with the phrase “I remember one time when it was me and these two/three other guys pinned down and we managed to…”

My experience of Frontlines was a radical departure to this in that, although I certainly have stories to tell, none of them have the other players playing more than a starring role. For me, Frontlines was a solo experience even when I was playing as a close combat player or in the gunner’s position on a tank.

That’s not to say that I don’t have stories worth telling though – oh no. In fact, Frontlines gave me some stories which are undoubtedly up there with the time that I did a barrel-roll in a boat in Far Cry, killing two guards and blowing up a car as I dived out in mid-air. Man that was intense.

One story in particular brilliantly showcases one of the major strengths of Frontlines as a game – sheer scale. You see, not only does the game have a fleet of 60 vehicles; it also has levels built for up to 64 players on the PC (32 maximum on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3).


So, story time: halfway through our game the two teams fell into a stalemate. In the centre of the map we were playing were two objectives which needed to be captured, one on the left and one on the right hand side. Control of these positions was just going backwards and forwards between teams. The Red Star Coalition would claim one, move over and try to take the other, when my team would claim it back. This happened five or six times in a row, until I managed to break the balance.

You see, the level we were playing on was very wide, open and flat. There were loads of small buildings lying around, but the major landmark were these huge silos in the middle of the map. Trust me when I say they were really big – so big that I didn’t actually think they were climbable.

In a moment of desperation though, I tried and was amazed to find that they were. I’m not joking when I say it took me two and a half minutes to climb up, during which control of the objectives switched over twice more.

When I finally got to the top I had an unrivalled camping spot and broke out both my sniper rifle and binoculars. I used a precision strike to let my team into one objective and used a carpet bomb to slow down the enemy as they advanced once more from their base. Then I fell back to the rifle, slowing down infantry while my team pressed forward and captured both objectives.


Somebody tried to take me out with a helicopter, but through luck and skill I was able to take them out by dropping grenades into the blades. By that point I was low on ammo and the enemy team had pressed forwards once more, decimating my team mates. I parachuted down back into the battle, doing my best to help but quickly being taken out when someone got behind me and rolled over me with a tank.

Needless to say that I was pretty happy with myself for finding and holding the location for so long, but I was actually more impressed by the size of the level itself – especially when Luis later on told me that we had only been playing on a medium sized level at best. Apparently the largest level is based over an area of eight sq. miles.

There is a potential problem with the maps though in that they may be quite limited. When the game launches it will have just eight missions in the singleplayer campaign and, although Luis stressed to me that the singleplayer and multiplayer missions are different, he did also say that they were inspired by each other. Personally, I wouldn’t be very surprised if the levels were heavily recycled between the two modes.

Since the levels also have to cater for different sized matches it means that if you’re a fan of smaller team matches then you’ll only have one or two maps suited to you.