Enemy Front Review.

By Sam Coles:

Enemy Front is an obscure game there was not much hype surrounding the game, what I like immediately is that it’s not another modern war shooter, they’ve gone back to the basic evil to frame. Nazis, you can kill as many as you want and not get a bad taste in your mouth. Unfortunately the game is far from perfect with its glitches and muddy textures.

You play as Robert Hawkins a war correspondent reporting deep within the polish resistance in Warsaw reporting the action as he fights alongside them. I like this character set up because you’re not playing as a soldier you’re an average person who is doing their jobs, but you can still shot the on button on a dishwasher door with pin point accuracy, so the whole average person persona gets swiftly thrown out window. When it comes to the story that’s it really there is not much else, there are a few flash back moments when he talks about how he got into the fight, but besides that the story is very lacklustre.

The gameplay is your standard fare of a first person shooter as in you look at the thing and you click on the thing and hope it dies. The controls do stager this though because when you aim down the sights it becomes very wavy and you end up spraying bullets all over the place.

Your character when moving him feels heavy, which wouldn’t be a problem if it didn’t feel like controlling an anvil attached to ice skates, when you stop moving with the left stick he continues for a little bit sliding about. It takes a Sniper Elite style when it comes to the sniper rifles as it goes into bullet time and you follow the bullet until it nails the soldier right in the face, but unlike Sniper Elite you don't see the detailed damage of bones and organs. 

What I do like about this game is its freedom to approach situations you can go in all guns blazing, you can scan enemy compounds with your binoculars and snipe them all silly or you can sneak past and stab all the evil Nazis in the throat.

But I ended up just going in all guns blazing because the stealth is a bit clunky accompanied with the AI being a bit simpleminded, for example you can cut them off in mid conversation when they are walking along and you take one of them hostage with a knife and the other AI character doesn’t notice and just keeps walking until you put a bullet in his head.

Even when you are in an open battle the enemy will have a habit of charging your position and gunning you down very quickly which does help with the damage system not telling you when you are near death, yes the screen goes slightly red but it does get redder when you are close to death it stays the same.

The game claims that it’s running on the Cryengine, yeah that Cryengine and it doesn’t show with all the blurry textures and bland character models with stiff animation, and don’t say because it’s only on the Xbox 360 and PS3 beacause Crysis 3 looked really good on the systems and that game came out last year.

Audio engineering is a bit hit miss because some sounds are not there for example when I hit an enemy with the stock of my gun there is no indication for it hitting him. There are some ambient noises that are not present and some parts of the game are awkwardly quiet. 

There are some points of the game where can sort of believe that the game is running with Cryengine for example when you are in the lush rural area of France with stretching green meadows and the sparkles as you walk through the tranquil river bed, but then you are back to the standard trope of modern shoots of brown ruined areas and industrial areas.

There are frequent frame rate drops in some areas especially when you are in the rural parts of France because I think the game has a problem processing all the trees and the grass and the frame rate goes from 30 to about 19 frames per second.

Overall the game had some unique and interesting gameplay and story ideas which unfortunately were poorly executed with clunky controls, bad voice acting and muddy graphics and textures. But it’s nice to see war shooters to go back to an idea where you can shoot people and have justified context because they’re Nazis they are evil and that is all the justification you need.