Frontlines™: Fuel of War™

TLDR; Neat in moderation, MP is offline though. Pretty okay game at most. The sound design is its absolute biggest strength, and if you just watch a video, you will understand. Sadly, it does not come close to the action of competing FPS games at the time of release (CoD4, WaW, Bad Company 1, Crysis, Far Cry 2) in either campaign or its somewhat dull campaign. Despite some decent visuals for 2008 as well, it lacks in detail and any real style with pretty much a basic Tom Clancy-esque "modern futureism" we'd see in games like Ghost Recon 2, Advanced Warfighter and later Black Ops 2. There is also no interesting or engaging story to be told or found whatsoever. If you think you might enjoy a big shoot fest of a 4 hour long campaign, this might be for you. Maybe you can find whoever is still playing this game (I haven't). On the topic of the campaign though, "non-linear levels" sound cool until you actually play them, and there isn't much freedom outside of what order you actually do the objectives in. The objectives also repetitively range from "Destroy this" or "Capture this"... or maybe even "Capture this but hold E". Not much variety, and it's very noticeable for the 4 hour campaign. It also does not help you MUST destroy the SAMs with C4 and nothing else (Because anything else does absolutely nothing). Why pretend there is choice when there is no choice? Why make it a selling point how open the game is when it's no more open than an average level in an older CoD title? I don't see the point at all. You can also choose your loadouts in levels... after you die. Oh, and once a "sequence" of a level ends, you are reset to the starting gear on the level, so crappy SMG here we go over and over, every level start. Once again, if you can somehow find whoever is playing the MP of this game, it can probably be a fun time, but a shooter is only as fun as its guns, and there are very few and they range from either being incredibly inaccurate but very strong or vise versa. There also some hurdles you need to jump through to even get the game working, like installing PhysX drivers, fixing the horrid FOV, disabling mouse acceleration and finding a way to get the shadows to stop becoming these horrifying square anomalies when you get too far. It does not help that the game's default price on Steam is 20 dollars. 20 dollars for a game where the fundimental element (The multiplayer) does not work, and HAS not worked FOR 15 YEARS. THE GAME'S MULTIPLAYER HAS BEEN LONGER THAN IT LIVED AND IT IS STILL 20 DOLLARS. WHAT THE ♥♥♥♥. If you find it on sale... maybe give it a try, but not anything more than 5 or 10 bones. Battlefield 2 still gets plenty of folks, so just do that instead (It's free now anyways).