Enemy Front

CI Games has a troubled history with shooters. From the Sniper series to Alien Rage, the studio has a habit of releasing critically slated shooters it taglines as "hardcore" and "revolutionary". To further this effort, CI Games recently recruited the talent of Stuart Black to its new London offices. So, does this newly added talent help CI to create a great game? No, but they might be learning how.

Enemy Front makes good on carrying on the tradition of grandiose CI game descriptions, billing itself as the "first truly modern WW2 FPS". I'm not really 100% sure on what constitutes a "truely modern" video game anymore, but I can see this coming from a number of different perspectives. Most likely I believe is probably the graphical capabilities of the game, which are quite nice seeing as Enemy Front runs on CryEngine 3 technology. The game looks fantastic in most levels, complete with signature CryEngine light shafts and snow effects. Aside from a few issues with scale, most of the environments and models are decently accurate to their real world counterparts, and weapons look and sound more accurate then I expected from a budget action title. Ambient noise seems to be all but non-existent however, making the environments feel much more sparse then they look. Some of the levels do contain musical cues to make up for this, and when they do the music thankfully is very well done, and extremely cinematic. Enemy Front runs smoothly for most of the game, but there were a few places where the frame rate dropped dramatically and consistently for no apparent reason. In addition to random FPS drops, I also constantly encountered a strange bug which caused Enemy Front to set its volume level in the Windows 7 mixer to 25%, causing the game to either constantly be soft, or forcing me to tab out of the game to open my volume mixer every 30 minutes to an hour. Aside from these complaints, the game looked and ran pretty decently.

So Enemy Front has pretty decent graphics and sound, but that's mostly expected with a game that has a big name licensed engine behind it. So what about the game play? Well, this is were things start to fall apart, and rather quickly. You play as Robert Hawkins, an American journalist trapped in the middle of the Warsaw uprising. The game starts with Hawkins making an impassioned radio plea for assistance from inside the embattled Warsaw, mirroring the real life John Ward's broadcasts down to the "This is Warsaw calling" opening. Unfortunately, this is about the extent of the historical accuracy Enemy Front concerns itself with. After the well done and touching opening cinematic, the game dumps you off in the middle of a firefight behind a blockade which you quickly abandon for the safety of the sewers, which you use for most of the first half of the game to move between levels. Enemy Front then gives you an option of which level to proceed to, and although the ability to direct the flow of fighting through levels is another selling point of the game, this is one of only a handful of times this actually happens; although the levels rarely feel like a corridor shooter, there is always a clear linear pathway through the levels.

Once you get into a level proper Enemy Front gives you a quick run down on its stealth element, which is what you may expect from an FPS game with stealth elements. Stay crouched, sneak up behind people, and stab them. There is also audio cover in some levels, a la Sniper Elite, which will allow you to fire shots without being heard. Unfortunately the stealth system is laughably broken, with soldiers commonly spotting you from the across the map, even when you are in cover. Except in a few cases were stealth is forced, it is almost always better to go in guns blazing. Combat is fast and furious, and getting kills feels weighty and good with each shot feeling like it has some force behind it. Unfortunately, although yet another tagline is "advanced tactical AI", enemy AI is almost entirely broken. Most troops will simply stand there and try to put as many rounds as they can toward you, while some do try to find cover but can't seem to shoot around it. In one level I had picked a trench gun as my main weapon, and found that many enemies would simply stand there and look at me if I rushed up on them. Although in some cases the AI worked well and attempted to flush me out of cover using grenades, in many cases the only challenge poised by my foes was the massive amount of damage I took if I did manage to get hit.

Probably the biggest I have with the main single player of Enemy Front is the story. The story starts in the middle of the Warsaw uprising, a time of great drama and plenty of heroic and incredible stories which have rarely been told in creative media. However, although Enemy Front does get some historical events correct, there are an equal number of inaccuracies, and most of the story that takes place in Warsaw revolves around defending a church which has seemingly little strategic value. About a third of the way through the main story, however, the story then inexplicably takes a strange turn in the form of flashbacks to various other fronts Mr. Hawkins has fought in, including France, Norway, and at one point even with a secret agent into Germany itself. Ignoring the fact that the idea a freelance journalist would somehow get the okay to tag along into these secret mission completely destroys your suspension of disbelief, these jump cuts also kill any sense of connection you had to the characters in any of these stages of the story. In addition, although the store page boasts of a 10 hour campaign, it took me barely over 5 hours to finish the campaign and the extra pack in mission on the hardest difficulty setting.

Although multiplayer plays decently for what it is, it is extremely sparse with support for only 12 players and handful of weapons and maps unless you pay the extra $5 for the DLC map pack. Although the weapons handle well, and the high damage output may attract some of the more hardcore oriented shooter fans or those looking for a faster paced shooting experience, the small, bland levels and restrictive player count made multiplayer easily the weakest part of the game for me.

All in all, although Enemy Front is a marked improvement from CI's previous efforts, they still have a long way to go. Slowly but surely, they may get there, but for now other current WW2 offerings such as Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad or Sniper Elite III easily win out.