Enemy Front Review

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War sells games, that’s a fact! Whether it is fighting on the battlefields of World War II, or fighting an alien army on some far fetched planet, it sells! Enemy Front is no different, going for the age old ‘defeat the Nazis by any means possible’ approach. To make a good shooter it has to be believable, it has to make you feel like you are in that war zone fighting a good fight for a good purpose. Enemy Front, however, sadly fails at this, and other points throughout the game. It is not often I open up a review by putting a game down, but I have to be honest, and honestly Enemy Front suffers from lack of budget, rushed production, poor textures and a host of other issues that in this day and age just should not happen.

The game starts by you taking up the persona of Robert Hawkins, an American reporter turned freedom fighter. Robert is helping the resistance in any way he can by picking up a weapon and notching it with Nazi kills. That all sounds like a great background to start a game, and it should have been, apart from the fact that Robert has the characteristics of a wet sandbag. In fact throughout the entire game each and every character you meet is poorly represented, by bad voice acting, and forgettable personalities. Robert’s role does come with some interesting choices in his efforts to help defeat the advancing Nazi army, however. These can be as simple as picking up two weapons, or for the more advanced, breaking through enemy lines to provide sniper support to your fellow fighters. All of this is set in a bland and glitchy environment, where soldiers float and walk through walls, textures are bland and flat and the weapons are so inaccurate that you can shoot someone in the head and have him get back up to kill you, or even make the bullet just whizz past his ear and watch him fall to his death.

City Interactive are known for their Sniper Ghost Warrior games, and playing the sniper sequences in Enemy Front are an exact replica of how they are in Ghost Warrior. Playing through the 16 levels that are in Enemy Front, there were many times when I just wanted to quit and never play again. This was mainly due to the awful checkpoints scattered through the game, sometimes you may have to completely restart a level over and over, dispite being right at the end. Adding to this is the many frame rate issues you will experience, I found it just terrible on every level. Enemy Front promises many ways to approach each level, and this part is true. You can use stealth to your advantage, or simply avoid all enemies and exit the level without even killing one soldier. The problem with this is that the stealth kills take so long you are often spotted before finishing the kill and the environments are so full of obstructions that most times you will be spotted by an enemy you haven’t even seen. You can also use the noise of passing planes to take out an enemy in your way, well that’s the theory, in my experience this very rarely worked, and finished with every soldier on the map being alerted to my presence. While this was frustrating, in a way it was funny to watch the dumb AI continually march into walls, or hover off the ground like something out of Star Wars. Failing any of the above working for you, I suggest you simply run like hell. I found myself being able to complete entire missions by just running through them like some bullet proof robot from the future.

Enemy Front’s campaign boils down to rushed, sloppy work, that should never have been allowed to release in it’s present form. It is apparent that this was a labour of love for someone, but I hazard a guess that all of the problems boiled down to money issues in the end. I find this a shame as there are sections of Enemy Front that showed the promise of the game it should have been. For instance the use of environmental factors to aid in the destruction of the Nazi army, the story could have been brilliant if not for the little effort put into the characters. The look of the game could have been crisper, and more believable if decent textures were used. Enemy Front has also got a multiplayer option for those of you who love to play online. Despite being slightly more presentable than the campaign, this option again is rather forgettable, poorly executed and well, simply boring. Radio Transmission is the only mode of play that showed any promise, and was a nice twist to the ordinary and drab offerings of multiplayer. I found the maps too big in these modes, so much so that it became a game of hide and seek rather than a Deathmatch. It seems these days companies are just throwing in multiplayer as an excuse to sell DLC at a later date.

Enemy Front promised a new experience, and it certainly gave me that, but definitely not in the way the developers intended. From the start it rapidly became a hot mess of glitches, poor quality environments and down right stupid AI. I truly have no intention of ever repeating my experience of Enemy Front, much less playing it online, which is a sad thing to say when the market is crying out for a decent World War II shooter. You may find the campaign of some interest if this was looking up at you from the bottom of the bargain bin, other than that, save your cash for more worthy titles.

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