Jun 18, 2014 Enemy Front review Fall back. Dan Whitehead. Senior Contributor, Eurogamer.net. I've said it before, and I'll no doubt say it again in another five years or so, but this is my favourite part of a.
It’s hard to believe but we’ve actually come full circle. There was a time, when Kiefer Sutherland was voicing marine corporals in videogames instead of aging spies, when the world came together and declared in one voice that we’ve had enough of killing Germans and Japanese in the 1940s. Luckily for Activision, they picked that exact time to put out a game about combat in today’s world, and we haven’t looked back since. Now City Interactive, best known for the Sniper Ghost Warrior franchise, has brought back first person shooting during World War II with a game called Enemy Front; and I can say that it doesn’t feel over done anymore. On top of that, you’ll instantly feel back at home since Enemy Front does absolutely nothing to change up the tried and true formula of shooting at people during World War II. In Enemy Front you play as Robert Hawkins, a war correspondent who decided that the best way to get the story he wants is from the front lines; so Robert spends all of World War II going from country to country and signing up with any resistance group that will have him.
That said, I never saw Robert actually write anything down. The closest Robert gets to reporting on the war is setting up a pirate radio station during the introductory cut scene so that he can tell everyone that war is hell. This is the point where I really wanted to complain about how the main character can instantly start doing any job (like soldiering or radio broadcasting) just because he can say to other people that, “I’m a writer. I know how this works.” Yes, that’s a line he says in this game, and yes he has that same smugness that most male characters have in videogames. Without turning this into novel I’ll simply tell you that I found Robert Hawkins personally insulting on multiple levels. Unfortunately, there is very little point in complaining about an annoying main character when faced with such a large number of technical issues.
To name a few, the AI is flat out dumb, the stealth system is unbalanced, the controls feel like I am fighting Robert for control, the voice acting has issues, and the list goes on. Topping that list would have to be the non-playable character AI, which is just not good on any level. I could give you a ton of examples, but my favorite happens when you’re in France for the first time. You begin this part of the game by ambushing two guards mid-patrol.
I was able to attack and take one down, and I would be okay if the other dude just didn’t notice. Instead, the conversation the German guards were having continued for some time, and my dead German was even contributing to it. It was only after that particular audio file stopped that the other German turned around. When you do get into a fire fight, the AI will either rush you like mad men, or stand there as you pick them off from cover. The few times that the Germans would duck down, it would always be behind a piece of the world that would never completely cover them.
During the first level, the Germans seemed to favor a desk model that had a giant hole in the middle, and after a while I had to wonder if the AI was just patronizing me. At another point in the game I was running down the center of a river to try and get to a bridge that I promised to blow up.
I suddenly stopped moving when I noticed that the vegetation cover to my left had disappeared and there was an enemy character just standing there looking at me. I figured I was in for a fight until the NPC, who was guarding this river I might add, just walked off in the other direction like he couldn’t be bothered. There is a good chance that this particular issue was caused by the stealth mechanics of Enemy Front. In Enemy Front you’re given a very long red bar on the right side of your user interface, and once that bar is filled the enemies will know you’re around; however, the bar starts to empty the second you’re behind cover and out of sight. As a result there were times when I was able to jump out of cover, kill a German soldier, and jump back behind cover before the bar was filled. You may wonder why that’s an issue, especially since there are whole games designed around the idea of stealth combat. Unfortunately, in Enemy Front you can kill one German in front of another, and no one will notice if you keep the stealth bar from filling up.
Although here is a tip for sneaking past the AI of this game, many of the maps are very big and the German NPCs usually seem to be grouped on the same side of the map you start on. I would always run to the other side of the map before proceeding to my objective and I always ran into few German NPCs. All of the other issues are pretty much self-explanatory. German bodies will either fall through other objects, or disappear when you’re not looking at them. The controls are heavier than the Titanic, and it really did feel like I was fighting the player character for control. My issue with the voice is whenever the main character speaks; he’s missing the same equalization and reverb as the NPCs.
This made Robert Hawkins sound like every line he delivered came while locked in the bathroom. This game does have multiplayer, but whoever made it doesn’t understand the idea of a quick match. Instead of dropping you into any match, as long as there are people; you pick quick match or private match. Then you decide to play ranked or unranked.
After that you choose from Deathmatch, Radio Transmission, or Team Deathmatch, and finally you pick to play on one of four maps. Beyond that I can’t tell you what the multiplayer is like because you need eight players to launch a round, and the closest I got was sitting in a lobby with six. To be fair, the game does have one or two gems buried deep beneath the surface. The maps are big and that allows for multiple approaches to one objective. The load times are covered by pretty vignettes that come in the form of 3D models in a nicely modelled area. The camera will fly through these vignettes while you wait for the next level to load, and trust me when I say they are by far the best looking visuals in the game.
![Enemy Front Review Enemy Front Review](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125497093/601792241.jpg)
The player’s radar also has a pair of lines in the shape of a V, and these will contract and expand depending on whether you’re looking down the sights of a gun or shooting from the hip. Since the enemy AI blends in with the surrounds I found these two lines to be very helpful when tracking down NPCs. In the end, I could write a witty paragraph that summed up my points, but all you really need to know is never buy this game. Never ever ever ever ever Never.
The Intro: There was a time when WWII shooters were the rage. You could turn in any direction and find anywhere from one to five WWII shooters staring you in the face. The reason for their popularity was clear – the source material was incredible, and there were many moments that were tailor-made for great first-person shooter action. However, the deluge of games drowned the market and saturated gamers.
Now, many years later, Enemy Front attempts to tackle the WWII shooter genre again. When you start the game, the loading screens show different intense moments from WWII history. Unfortunately, the game is all downhill from there. The Story: You play as Robert Hawkins, an American journalist who has been so influenced by the war that he’s turned into a freedom fighter. You’ll play as Robert through a series of missions, most of which have you accompanying a small team or a large squadron. You play through a lot of different locales during the story, but most of these make logical sense geographically.
You don’t have missions in places that it would have been impossible to reach during the timeline of the game for someone who starts off where you do in Europe. As a reporter, you’d expect that Hawkins would be good at delivering speeches, especially those of the motivational kind. Unfortunately, the game bungles both the presentation and the delivery of these moments. As a result, what could have been a stirring emotional journey turns into an unintentionally hilarious one.
If the character of Hawkins was voiced competently, you could ignore the few leaps in logic that the game takes in showing his character progression. It’s also puzzling to see that Hawkins struggles with the idea of seeing who the good guys are in the war for such a long time. The Game Play: The game is a WWII shooter, and it’s no surprise that you will be killing a ton of Nazis. The visceral thrill of getting to eliminate more Nazi bad guys is one of the very few things that keeps you motivated to power through the campaign.
You have the usual FPS tropes at your disposal – eliminating multiple enemies with a single bullet, bouncing grenades off wall to blow up unsuspecting enemies, and lighting up flammable objects in the environment to send more Nazis flying. The game also borrows a few elements from Sniper: Ghost Warrior in its sniping sections. In fact, when you’re playing with the sniper rifle, it’s easy to mistake this game for the aforementioned one. While you’re allowed to play with whatever weapon you like, most missions are best served by playing as a sniper.
In places, you’ll see glimpses of what the developers were trying to do. For example, you can pick missions of your choice. Some other levels employ nifty physics based ideas that the game unfortunately abandons completely later on. Whether it was due to budgetary constraints or simply biting off more than the developers could chew, this game would’ve been much better off if it followed through with these innovative ideas.
The maps in Enemy Front are large, and at first glance they might seem to have the same flexibility in executing your missions as a game like Dishonored. But when you’ve suffered through the game’s tardy checkpoint system and made your way across the same ruined French landscape a dozen times, all of your illusions will go out through the window. The enemies in each section of the map act in exactly the same way every single time you are treading through the terrain. If you’ve played a lot of shooter games, you will be able to maneuver through these sections easily. In another of the game’s failed ideas, there are some sections that are supposed to cater to stealth gamers, but these are extremely poorly designed. Stealth kills take way longer than melee kills and leave you vulnerable to detection.
So when you’re faced with a choice, you’re better off skipping the stealth and going for the melee kills every single time. The multiplayer mode is somewhat better, but only in contrast with the mediocrity of the rest of the game. The online modes generally run pretty smoothly, even if you can only play in generic deathmatch or conquest scenarios. Weapons spawn at exactly the same place every single time, so you can expect to see a lot of rocket-launcher camping.
The Conclusion: Enemy Front is a thoroughly unremarkable game. It tries to juggle a lot of different balls, but doesn’t do a competent job with any of them. You could be mistaken for forgetting which generic WWII shooter you are playing midway through the game.
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If you’re terribly nostalgic about WWII shooters and desperately want to kill some Nazis in Europe, you might want to give this a try. But for the most part, you will be better off revisiting some of the old games you liked, or even trying something like, even if it isn’t exactly the most accurate recreation of history. Game Trailer.