In the preview build, there were two campaign modes – one for the Allied forces and the other for the Germans – with each featuring 11 missions to accomplish. Each campaign follows the story of an out of place character that possesses unbelievable amount of strength, akin to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s characters in movies, enabling them to laugh at death and take on tasks that would be best suited for a squadron of men. While the game is set in an alternative world, the characters are as poorly represented as people from your typical Hollywood action film, which really makes no sense in war. Additionally, there will be strong multiplayer options that allow up to 5vs5 battles and ladder rankings, as well as a skirmish mode.
Despite the questionable decision to make an Arnold Schwarzenegger-like story, the gameplay holds up relatively well as far as real-time strategy games go. Inspiration from Command & Conquer is apparent within a few short minutes of playing the game. While the setting is a little different, the gameplay is structured in a very similar way to the old-school C&C titles, which is certainly not a bad choice to extract ideas from.
There’s not a lot that sets War Front above any other real-time strategy title, but thankfully it manages to provide a fairly straightforward and addictive gameplay structure that’s easy to enjoy. You’ll start off with an HQ and from there you’ll be able to construct a large and powerful army. Resources are in place and are easily maintained by building electrical generators to power your buildings and resource trucks that gather the one source of material that’ll power your entire army and your buying habits, which is very similar to C&C. You’ll also be able to construct barracks, tank depots, pillars, radars and airbases that’ll feed your army with defences and units.
Traditional? Perhaps. Enjoyable? You bet.
There are also different tech levels that enable you to obtain new units, skills and buildings the further your advance through the techs. The first level tech will allow you to build basic units such as infantry and light tanks, but as you dig into the second and third tech levels you’ll be able to control powerful units, including the game’s interesting World War/Sci-fi units. There are three factions to play as in the game (Russia, America/UK and Germany), all of which have each of their own special units, technologies and buildings. The Allies rely on a range of explosive units and technologies, namely their earthquake bomb that blasts a large portion of the map into pieces. The Germans have jetpack troopers, large robots and stealth bombers. While, finally, the Russian’s have a tank that can immobilise units with its freeze-beam. There’s a healthy range of variety between each faction, so there’s plenty of reason to explore the benefits of each of them.
Additionally, the game includes a few ideas that haven’t been featured in too many real-time strategy games. The most noticeable feature is where you’ll be able to dropdown into a first-person perspective and take control of your turrets for precise aiming. This idea isn’t unknown in the genre, since games such as Faces of War and Rise & Fall also incorporated similar features, but with little success. There really seems to be no purpose for it in War Front either. It often bogs down the gameplay, as you’ll need to switch from the overhead view to a first-person view during the most hectic situations. That’s generally speaking of course - but unless War Front reinvents the implementation of such an idea, we don’t see its purpose in the genre.
From the build we've played, there were quite a few omissions from War Fronts’ game mechanics, which are often expected in real-time strategy games and are important in World War titles of this nature. There’s no formation variations to speak of, which makes it difficult to avoid tank fire or explosions. Games like Company of Heroes and Faces of War incorporated great cover-AI, where your units would seek cover or vantage points once coming under fire. War Front doesn’t capitalise on this at all. Equally, there’s an absence of depth with unit abilities too. While standard infantry units can overrun buildings or plant bombs, we couldn’t find any use of standard World War items such as grenades, barbwire or sandbags.
X marks the spot.
War Front is optimised in a rather attractive way but lacks a bit of polish that is seen in similar titles such as Company of Heroes. Certain effects excel over others, such as lighting and shadowing, and the destruction of buildings is superb, but animation and the performance of the game is a tad sluggish. The preview build had several dips in frame rate, which will hopefully be addressed by the time it’s released. War Front blends a nice little day/night and weather effects into the game that often have subtle effect on battles, such as hindering sight of units.
The build we played was a few months old, but provided us with the fundamentals of the game. There are several areas that are obviously shameful for its setting, namely the hero characters and the lack of real war intensity, but as a standard real-time strategy title War Front: Turning Point is surprisingly good. We’re unsure how it’ll stack up against the other RTS bigwigs being released this year, but there’s a lot of potential for this game. And with a Command & Conquer feel, it may win a few hearts.
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