For a setting as overused as World War II, an RTS developer really needs to have some very good ideas in order to have a shot at breaking through the clutter. That was clearly on the minds of the Digital Reality development team as it was putting together War Front: Turning Point. It’s an intriguing RTS experiment that boasts quite a few good ideas. Unfortunately, good ideas by themselves aren’t enough to make a game great. Execution matters as well. In the case of War Front, balance, design and presentation issues turn what might have been a fresh new take on the setting into an intriguing but ultimately forgettable curiosity.
The game’s setting begins with a "what if?" scenario. During the early days of World War II, Operation Sea Lion succeeds and German forces quickly conquer London and much of southern England. Their progress slows as they get bogged down by the American-aided British resistance. Several years of a hostile stalemate ensue in which the Allies and the Germans continue to battle. The game picks up just as the stalemate’s about to break. The Brits are taking back London; the German Resistance is about to assassinate Hitler, and two former enemies will be forced to team up to defend themselves against a Soviet Union that’s begun to march across Europe.
It’s this intriguing setting that marks War Front’s greatest strength. While it’s more than a little derivative of Command & Conquer: Red Alert, the campy way that a plausible alternate history scenario quickly veers off into absolute insanity is a whole lot of fun. Each of the game’s three sides sports a selection of unit types that include classic World War II hardware like Sherman tanks and the Katyusha rocket launcher. These share the battlefield with plausible-but-never-deployed weapons like the jet-powered ME-262 and bizarre and fanciful items like German jetpack troopers, Russian ice cannons, giant zeppelins and American force shield generators. All of them are beautifully drawn and animated and each is enjoyable to use in its own way.
Once players get past the novelty of the game’s setting, what remains is the realization that, for all the graphic difference between the three sides, there really isn’t that much difference strategically. The basic design of the game is classic "rock-paper-scissors" in which the player with one extra pair of scissors wins. Units are quite fragile, resources are abundant and everyone’s got the same collection of light, medium and heavy units including infantry, armor, artillery and air forces. For every unit ability there’s a corresponding counter-ability. The result is that players should expect a lot of units on screen and for lots of stuff to blow up very quickly. Gameplay tends to weave back and forth between massive build-ups and tank rushes and individual combat gets decided more by unit mix than any actual strategy on the player’s part. Like the setting itself, it’s strikingly reminiscent of the classic Red Alert gameplay and exactly the opposite of the more deliberative tactical approach of a Company of Heroes.
It should be noted that such a "brute force" design is not in itself a bad thing. There’s a reason that the original Red Alert is a classic and the latest Command & Conquer game has gone back to that style. In its best moments War Front is quite reminiscent of those games. It’s definitely a rush to finally get the unit mix just right, slam through a well-designed defensive perimeter to clear out anti-aircraft emplacements, and finally drop an earthquake bomb on the enemy’s base. Perhaps this is why virtually every one of the game’s campaign missions seems to revolve around just that sort of base destruction and why (War Front aside) such "puzzle maps" have thankfully gone the way of the dodo. Once is fun -- two dozen times not so much.
War Front’s main problem is that it lacks confidence in its own design choices. The game tosses in elements that, while good in isolation, simply don’t mesh well with its basic strategic bias. In just one example, each side has hero units that can be leveled up WarCraft III-style and gifted with a variety of special powers. Such units have proven their worth in many RTS games since Blizzard pushed them to prominence and are quite common these days.
They really don’t work in War Front, though. They (and every other unit) simply die too fast and require too much micromanagement. If I need to hotkey three or four hero powers on three different units, level them up, manage my own national powers and do research upgrades at two or three different buildings while planning the maneuvers of hundreds of the units... I’m afraid I ran out of micromanagement space in my brain a while back. It doesn’t help that there are actually too many unit choices -- early units get run over by later units that essentially duplicate their functionality, so why not just cut the early ones and let us avoid the time-consuming technology build-up?
Indeed, it often seems like one of the main goals of War Front was to pack in ideas from every recent modern RTS and hope they’d work. Sometimes they do. The game has a factory production option to automatically produce units and place them into hot-keyed unit groupings that’s so insanely useful I hope it becomes standard in RTS games going forward. Construction units can have building orders queued up in a system similar to Supreme Commander.
Other times they simply don’t. Once players reach tech level 3, for example, they have the option of switching on the fly between offensive and defensive unit bonuses in a manner similar to AoEIII: The WarChiefs’ Fire Pit mechanic. That might actually be useful in a game where battles don’t usually result in 90% casualties in the first few seconds.
Then there’s the first-person mode. In theory, players can jump into stationary units and actually fire at the enemy action-game style. In reality, said ability is almost completely useless in a game that moves so fast. Taking your eye off the battlefield for any prolonged period of time is a guaranteed defeat (and may also cause lesser computers to slow to a crawl).
This same problem even carries through to the game’s presentation. War Front’s storyline is presented through attractive stylized cutscenes filled with lots of action, gunfire and explosions -- too much in fact. Every scene is loaded with jump-cuts, bullet-time moments, shaky-cams following characters around, POV shots, fisheye lenses and every other film-school technique that could be crammed in. I can accept getting motion-sickness while playing a first-person shooter... not so much a cutscene. And while the story itself is good once you buy into the bizarre setting, it’s told through some incredibly bad voice acting.
The game also suffers from pretty lackluster AI on both a unit and a strategic level. Pathfinding isn’t hideous, but it’s certainly not one of the game’s strengths. Tank drivers in War Front’s world sure must hate trees, because more often than not they’ll slowly drive through heavily forested areas rather than take a roadway right next to them. Units also don’t bother to order themselves in any sort of sensible fashion, instead running at speed toward their designated objectives in ways guaranteed to get them cut down piecemeal. In Skirmish mode the AI tends to build up too many of the wrong buildings and (judging by my own games) goes for more and cheaper units rather than bringing out enough of the big guns. Perhaps the AI’s theory is I’ll get tired rolling over the shattered remains of its tanks and just give up.
Multiplayer is a completely different story. The bad news is that the recent release of several high-profile RTS games means that players will often be confronted with sparsely populated game lobbies. Should they manage to get a game up, though, War Front in multiplayer is a great knock-down drag-out brute force RTS with tons of units and lots of explosions. The developers tossed in plenty of options for multiplayer, including time of day, weather, and whether or not supply crates drop from the sky. There are also vanilla deathmatch and conquest modes in which the player can win by occupying certain sectors of the map for a specified time.
The real kick is the "Secret Orders" mode in which every player gets a secret victory condition that allows them to win the game (such as making a specified amount of money or getting all of their units to a particular location or destroying a certain number of buildings). This is incredibly fun as it really challenges the players to try to achieve their secret order while simultaneously camouflaging their actions from their opponents. The game announces when a player is halfway to their goal, which throws the whole game into an uproar as every other player shifts gears to stop them.
In the end, War Front is a collection of good ideas with muddled execution. There’s a lot to like in this bizarre tale of an alternate World War II, and the game’s multiplayer component certainly has its charms. If War Front could have included half the brilliant ideas and twice the design integration, it might have become a modern classic rather than a fairly mediocre curiosity. That’s an alternate history I would have liked to have lived.
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The game’s setting begins with a "what if?" scenario. During the early days of World War II, Operation Sea Lion succeeds and German forces quickly conquer London and much of southern England. Their progress slows as they get bogged down by the American-aided British resistance. Several years of a hostile stalemate ensue in which the Allies and the Germans continue to battle. The game picks up just as the stalemate’s about to break. The Brits are taking back London; the German Resistance is about to assassinate Hitler, and two former enemies will be forced to team up to defend themselves against a Soviet Union that’s begun to march across Europe.
It’s this intriguing setting that marks War Front’s greatest strength. While it’s more than a little derivative of Command & Conquer: Red Alert, the campy way that a plausible alternate history scenario quickly veers off into absolute insanity is a whole lot of fun. Each of the game’s three sides sports a selection of unit types that include classic World War II hardware like Sherman tanks and the Katyusha rocket launcher. These share the battlefield with plausible-but-never-deployed weapons like the jet-powered ME-262 and bizarre and fanciful items like German jetpack troopers, Russian ice cannons, giant zeppelins and American force shield generators. All of them are beautifully drawn and animated and each is enjoyable to use in its own way.
Once players get past the novelty of the game’s setting, what remains is the realization that, for all the graphic difference between the three sides, there really isn’t that much difference strategically. The basic design of the game is classic "rock-paper-scissors" in which the player with one extra pair of scissors wins. Units are quite fragile, resources are abundant and everyone’s got the same collection of light, medium and heavy units including infantry, armor, artillery and air forces. For every unit ability there’s a corresponding counter-ability. The result is that players should expect a lot of units on screen and for lots of stuff to blow up very quickly. Gameplay tends to weave back and forth between massive build-ups and tank rushes and individual combat gets decided more by unit mix than any actual strategy on the player’s part. Like the setting itself, it’s strikingly reminiscent of the classic Red Alert gameplay and exactly the opposite of the more deliberative tactical approach of a Company of Heroes.
It should be noted that such a "brute force" design is not in itself a bad thing. There’s a reason that the original Red Alert is a classic and the latest Command & Conquer game has gone back to that style. In its best moments War Front is quite reminiscent of those games. It’s definitely a rush to finally get the unit mix just right, slam through a well-designed defensive perimeter to clear out anti-aircraft emplacements, and finally drop an earthquake bomb on the enemy’s base. Perhaps this is why virtually every one of the game’s campaign missions seems to revolve around just that sort of base destruction and why (War Front aside) such "puzzle maps" have thankfully gone the way of the dodo. Once is fun -- two dozen times not so much.
War Front’s main problem is that it lacks confidence in its own design choices. The game tosses in elements that, while good in isolation, simply don’t mesh well with its basic strategic bias. In just one example, each side has hero units that can be leveled up WarCraft III-style and gifted with a variety of special powers. Such units have proven their worth in many RTS games since Blizzard pushed them to prominence and are quite common these days.
They really don’t work in War Front, though. They (and every other unit) simply die too fast and require too much micromanagement. If I need to hotkey three or four hero powers on three different units, level them up, manage my own national powers and do research upgrades at two or three different buildings while planning the maneuvers of hundreds of the units... I’m afraid I ran out of micromanagement space in my brain a while back. It doesn’t help that there are actually too many unit choices -- early units get run over by later units that essentially duplicate their functionality, so why not just cut the early ones and let us avoid the time-consuming technology build-up?
Indeed, it often seems like one of the main goals of War Front was to pack in ideas from every recent modern RTS and hope they’d work. Sometimes they do. The game has a factory production option to automatically produce units and place them into hot-keyed unit groupings that’s so insanely useful I hope it becomes standard in RTS games going forward. Construction units can have building orders queued up in a system similar to Supreme Commander.
Other times they simply don’t. Once players reach tech level 3, for example, they have the option of switching on the fly between offensive and defensive unit bonuses in a manner similar to AoEIII: The WarChiefs’ Fire Pit mechanic. That might actually be useful in a game where battles don’t usually result in 90% casualties in the first few seconds.
Then there’s the first-person mode. In theory, players can jump into stationary units and actually fire at the enemy action-game style. In reality, said ability is almost completely useless in a game that moves so fast. Taking your eye off the battlefield for any prolonged period of time is a guaranteed defeat (and may also cause lesser computers to slow to a crawl).
This same problem even carries through to the game’s presentation. War Front’s storyline is presented through attractive stylized cutscenes filled with lots of action, gunfire and explosions -- too much in fact. Every scene is loaded with jump-cuts, bullet-time moments, shaky-cams following characters around, POV shots, fisheye lenses and every other film-school technique that could be crammed in. I can accept getting motion-sickness while playing a first-person shooter... not so much a cutscene. And while the story itself is good once you buy into the bizarre setting, it’s told through some incredibly bad voice acting.
The game also suffers from pretty lackluster AI on both a unit and a strategic level. Pathfinding isn’t hideous, but it’s certainly not one of the game’s strengths. Tank drivers in War Front’s world sure must hate trees, because more often than not they’ll slowly drive through heavily forested areas rather than take a roadway right next to them. Units also don’t bother to order themselves in any sort of sensible fashion, instead running at speed toward their designated objectives in ways guaranteed to get them cut down piecemeal. In Skirmish mode the AI tends to build up too many of the wrong buildings and (judging by my own games) goes for more and cheaper units rather than bringing out enough of the big guns. Perhaps the AI’s theory is I’ll get tired rolling over the shattered remains of its tanks and just give up.
Multiplayer is a completely different story. The bad news is that the recent release of several high-profile RTS games means that players will often be confronted with sparsely populated game lobbies. Should they manage to get a game up, though, War Front in multiplayer is a great knock-down drag-out brute force RTS with tons of units and lots of explosions. The developers tossed in plenty of options for multiplayer, including time of day, weather, and whether or not supply crates drop from the sky. There are also vanilla deathmatch and conquest modes in which the player can win by occupying certain sectors of the map for a specified time.
The real kick is the "Secret Orders" mode in which every player gets a secret victory condition that allows them to win the game (such as making a specified amount of money or getting all of their units to a particular location or destroying a certain number of buildings). This is incredibly fun as it really challenges the players to try to achieve their secret order while simultaneously camouflaging their actions from their opponents. The game announces when a player is halfway to their goal, which throws the whole game into an uproar as every other player shifts gears to stop them.
In the end, War Front is a collection of good ideas with muddled execution. There’s a lot to like in this bizarre tale of an alternate World War II, and the game’s multiplayer component certainly has its charms. If War Front could have included half the brilliant ideas and twice the design integration, it might have become a modern classic rather than a fairly mediocre curiosity. That’s an alternate history I would have liked to have lived.
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