Ralf's utter inability to provide an interesting soundbite angered the mighty journalistĬase in point, levels are typically open enough to encourage a few different approaches. It's not going to rock your world, but there's enough variety to the shooting to keep your attention. Visits to Norway and Poland offer a chance to experiment with other less well-known equipment from the era. Unique examples include the one-shot Welrod Pistol and the DeLisle Carbine, a silenced long-range weapon. Weapons are chunky and satisfying to use, with more variety than most WWII shooters. You'll come for the combat, and Enemy Front does a pretty good job here. It's more Captain America than Band of Brothers.Īnd that's fine. Axis soldiers spend half their time machine-gunning French peasants to death against a barn door, and the other half receiving an amateur tracheotomy from some heroic resistance fighter's rusty combat knife.
It's not as if Enemy Front is trying to tell a human story about the cost of war.
I guess the nationality of the floating head holding the gun doesn't really matter when you're in the midst of a decent firefight. why is he the one doing that? I half expected the camera to cut back to several confused and disgruntled Polish soldiers wondering who the hell this Yank is hogging the radio set. There's one mission set in a Warsaw hospital which opens with our chisel-jawed all-American hero making a defiant broadcast from the war-zone, and I was thinking. Especially coming from a Polish studio who I would have thought would relish the chance to tell the story of their country's pretty remarkable actions during the war. Quite apart from wondering why a civilian who should be reporting on the horrors of war suddenly whips out a pistol and starts blowing the kneecaps off of unfortunate German soldiers, the American perspective on the war has been pretty heavily covered. It's all very pretty, and it's nice to visit some new locations.Īnother foolish German patrol underestimates the combat skill of the USA's elite journalistic divisionĪll this is slightly undermined by the decision to make the lead character a boring American journalist with a comedy French photographer sidekick. Enemy Front neatly side-steps the issue, common to many WWII games, of every level being a smudge of browns and greys. This globe-hopping action is powered by the CryEngine 3, which ensures that there's a variety of different environments that all look interesting and unique. And smoking a cigarette), but soon enough you're stomping around Poland at the height of German occupation, or sneaking through the fjords and mountains of Norway. Sure, you start off in occupied France rescuing a female resistance officer (I think she was genuinely wearing a beret. What was immediately apparent upon starting my hands-on demo was that developers City Interactive are keen on taking the action to areas of the war we haven't seen much of up to this point. Enemy Front is promising a return to the heady days of a one man (generally American) army storming occupied Europe. Then, just like that dinosaur metaphor, it outstayed its welcome, and the genre all but disappeared from our computer screens. This was the Tyrannosaurus Rex of popular genres, striding across the landscape of PC gaming devouring all competition. Medal of Honour, Call of Duty 1 and 2, Return to Castle Wolfenstein – a seemingly never-ending avalanche of games that ensured MP40s, stielhandgranates and Flak 88s became as familiar to gamers as cats and dogs. Go back ten years and you couldn't move for them. It's certainly been a while since we've had a World War II FPS.