Frontlines: Fuel of War

Published by THQ, Frontlines: Fuel of War is the company’s answer to EA and DICE’s long-running and successful Battlefield franchise. The game is an FPS with a multiplayer focus, offering huge battles with upwards of 64 players per map and vehicles at your disposal. While the game is set to differentiate itself from the current crop of large-scale online shooters by offering a more focused single-player element, GameZone was given a crack at the multiplayer element, and the results were pretty fun. Fans of the Battlefield series might want to keep an eye open for this one.

Frontlines: Fuel of War takes place in the near future when the entire world is stuck in the middle of a furious resource war. The world has united itself into two halves, the Western Coalition, which is composed of the US and Europe, and the Red Star Alliance, composed of the former Soviet Union and China. The fighting has gotten pretty vicious and spans several different countries that have been turned into destroyed battlegrounds.

Like the Battlefield series, Frontlines is centered on large-scale battles in a multiplayer realm. You have special objectives and capture points that you must obtain, gaining your team and your character points towards your victory and special abilities (more on them later). The game’s maps are huge and rife with vehicles, offering plenty of opportunities for many players. You’ll be able to select certain class focuses once you get onto the battlefield, with the standards like Sniper and Assault classes making appearances.

One element that is pretty special is the abilities that you can gain by completing missions in the battles. While these don’t save to your profile and carry over to subsequent battles (a la Call of Duty 4), you’ll be able to have access to them until the current battle is over. These include air support elements and ground support, depending on which role you decide on.

Graphically, the game is pretty impressive. The game utilizes a modified version of the Unreal Engine 3 to great effect. The character models and environments look great and boast some nice realistic details and lighting effects. The game also has some pretty impressive special effects, like motion blur, that add to the game’s overall realistic look. While the performance in the preview build took some hits when certain detail sliders were turned up too high, but it cleaned up quite a bit once the detail levels were lowered a bit.

Frontlines: Fuel of War is shaping up to be a fun and intense multiplayer shooter that will appeal to Battlefield fans. While the single-player mode (which is one of the main key points of the game) was unavailable for preview, the multiplayer mode exhibited some fun gameplay elements with support for up to 64 players, meaning that it shouldn’t disappoint fans of large-scale battles.