Enemy Front – Review
Enemy Front, the latest title from CI Games goes back to the basics that made current franchises as Call of Duty and Battlefield the behemoths they are today. The game provides us with a World War II setting but not from the real soldiers’ point of view but from the common Joe, namely the resistance. Sadly the true enemy front this game finds itself on is filled with unfinished ideas, bugs and poor AI.
Story
You play the role of Robert Hawkings, who is a journalist during the second World War. He’s a man that lives on the edge to report about the atrocities the Germans are committing on a daily basis. Along the way he find help from the resistance and soldiers.
The game starts off where Robert does a radio broadcast where he tries to motivate all those around him. He wishes to tell the tale of those he has fought with and that not only soldiers have the power to rise up and fight their oppressors.
After the short introduction you’ll find yourself playing through the memories of Hawkings and the brave men and women he came across during his battles. Sadly the story portions are fairly meager and often lack extra information to realize exactly where you are or what your true objective is.
Enemy Front tries to tell us an original tale but sadly it feels a tad underdeveloped to create interesting characters or even a close attachment to these past heroes.
Graphics
Enemy Front again shows us that it is filled with good ideas but fails to deliver on most of them. The game tries to create a fairly open world feeling and thus provides us with a lot of items and such on the map. Lots of broken houses, rubble, shrubbery and what not can be seen on each of the maps but sadly most of them seem to be either copy paste or just poorly finished. A lot of these items look fairly awfully detailed and sadly when shot upon they don’t even show signs of damage. Perhaps I’m simply mistaken and during the olden days we had indestructible, bulletproof wooden tables.
Gunshots never leave a real trace, explosions cause no damage and enemies only show blood splatters half of the time. These enemies often have the same face and the same can be said for your allies. These identical faces are also fairly poorly animated and show no character whatsoever.
Enemies often have the tendency to glitch when they come running at you, making it seem as if they topple like a plank but still their normal target area to hit them stays in effect. Bodies tend to fly above the air or enemies die in the position they were taking aim in and so on. Also, bodies of the victims of the Nazis often are identical to each other, which again takes away a lot of the game’s original authentic feeling.
For a game that aims for atmosphere and authenticity, the creators have reused too many textures which as a result dampens the atmosphere the creators were aiming for.
An honorable mention goes out to the fairly pretty looking loading screen, which takes a bit of stress away from the long loading times.
Keep in mind we have tested the console version when it comes to graphics and they were subpar across the entire game.
Sound
Memorable is not the keyword that comes to mind when the overall soundtrack of Enemy Front is described. Whilst the overall sound quality does the trick, it’s pretty much a typical generic soundtrack to match a war game.
The voice acting is not really outstanding but in the end it ends up being fairly pleasant and qualitative.
Gameplay
Enemy Front is a fairly typical looking FPS game that situates itself in the World War II theme. You’ll be presented with different situations where you’ll have to kill Nazis or escape from them.
The game tries to offer a more open experience in its single player mode than most other FPS games that situate itself around more realistic situations. Most of the missions are to be played in a fairly open world where you can decide how you will try to achieve your goal. This offers the player to try to take on a more stealthy approach or just kick in the door and shoot everything that moves.
When trying to play stealthy, a few issues immediately arrive. You’ll carry around a pouch of pebbles which can be thrown to distract enemies. For some reason, your pebble does its best to fly anywhere except for where you aimed for. This will result in you throwing your rock against those you wanted to distract and then it’s pretty much game over when it comes to your stealthy approach. At other times, the game just doesn’t feel like as if was designed with stealth in mind.
When playing for some time, you’ll notice that the developers did their best to try and create a more realistic shooter than many of the arcade shooters on the market. Your character will only be able to take a few hits and sometimes you’ll even die from one hit. Thus the expression ‘guns blazing’ has to be taken fairly lightly. That being said, it’s quite satisfying when you’re able to clear each zone without dying.
Dying will always set you back a decent amount in the single player. You’ll never go back until the start of the mission, but you’ll have to do some sections over and over to finally get through.
Seeing this game is designed by the creators of the Sniper series, you’ll be treated to some decent sniping scenes as well. Again this is an example of the designers trying to please everyone, sadly this is not the case for most of the time of the game.
You’ll encounter a decent amount of bugs during your playthrough, where shots don’t connect with your target, where you might end up dying after killing all enemies but one. Sometimes the game tends to miss shots at point blank range, you’ll get punched from several meters away and so on. These tend to be quite annoying when they happen more than once during each play session.
On the other hand you’ll have the incredibly stupid AI, that hides in plain sight or on the wrong side of their cover, which puts them directly in your firing range. Other times they just run around without a goal and even tend to come out of the woodwork when you’re truly lucky.
Whilst everything above might not sound that bad, the game just feels unfinished a quite bland. You’ll never experience something new and the things you experience have been presented to you in a better way in dozens of other games.
The game does its best to offer a fairly long single player and in the end this is great, seeing the multiplayer is simply deserted. Enemy Front has a multiplayer mode that was already dead on arrival. When trying to play online, I constantly happened to be the only player online and thus the multiplayer modes have not really been tested. In the end, these were simple modes such as in other shooters.
Sadly, the game does not support split screen and thus, you’ll probably never be able to experience the multiplayer missions for yourself. I doubt you’ll be able to convince enough friends to buy this game to play together.
Conclusion
Enemy Front tries to combine the best of what the FPS genre has to offer but by trying to achieve such a feat it ends up being a mix of good intentions and poor execution. You’ll never be wowed during your gameplay, you won’t be able to play online seeing the game is deserted. The game’s only merit is its long single player campaign, that might keep you entertained for a bit.
Enemy Front - Review,
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short and to the point, The game has their disadvantages, however, dragged me all day, missions and locations well done, the graphics a bit better than the trailers, I did not notice major bugs, feature great music also look great weapons, in other words, how to play with a budget, and the price worth it, especially for people who yearn for WWII games
I’m wondering if you played the console or the PC version. The graphical quality on the 360 was subpar, as well as it provided me with a lot of frame drops, glitches and bugs.
The environments were often copy paste material and so on.
The single player is what saved the game from a failure, in my honest opinion.