Enemy Front Review

I can't say I'm all that keen on the level design, either. It's hardly surprising that all the generic explosion-packed action sections are set in over-decorated corridors, that's par for the course, but even when the stealthy bits begin and it's time for the environment to expand, it doesn't seem to loosen more than one or two notches on its belt. You do get multiple paths, thankfully, but they provide that very particular system of choice where there's only one right answer: once you've eliminated all the options that are being watched by snipers, require you to dash across open ground, or contain two Nazis resolutely staring over one another's shoulders in one of the most infuriating examples of self-preservation ever developed, there's really only a single viable route left. This fact, as well as your possession of a map, a minimap, and explicit directions on where to go, is apparently lost on the HUD, which insists on keeping the objective marker around like a smelly friend you don't really want to talk to any more. Not that there would be any reason to stray off the beaten path anyway: health regenerates and ammo is common - absurdly common, almost as if there's a war going on or something - so you won't gain any gameplay advantages from it, and the only other things you could possibly find are completely arbitrary collectibles, without so much as a newspaper clipping or handwritten note to liven things up. “Oh wow, I've gained such an uplifting sense of achievement from locating four out of four shiny bobbins in this level.” Do you want to know why I didn't attribute that quote to somebody? Because nobody in the history of humanity has actually said it. Ever.

No matter how good the stealth is, sooner or later Enemy Front degrades - or simply flips over - to its action, and while this part is mechanically competent, it's severely lacking in imagination. You shoot the Nazis, they shoot back, you win because you can tank bullets and your targets move between cover like a retiree fetching the newspaper from the mailbox in the morning. The game tries desperately to keep things varied with the odd turret section or sniper battle, but it doesn't work because we've all seen it done a thousand times over the last six or seven years. What exactly is the appeal in shooting a tank with a Panzerfaust, anyway? You hold right-click, take aim at a massive unmoving target that seems strangely disinterested in dispatching you, and then left-click. Unless you're the kind of person that happily gurgles “boom!” and claps their hands together every time something explodes on-screen, that doesn't sound particularly satisfying. And yes, Enemy Front, it was kind of cool the first time I broke down a door in slow motion and shot everybody in the room, but it was old-hat before you jumped on the idea, and your repetitive use of it has only forced it to grow more stale than ever before. The game even does that Sniper Elite thing where you watch your rifle bullet sail through the air and tunnel through your target, only without the creepy psychotic gore-o-vision, and therefore significantly less interesting. Maybe I've just been spoiled by months of covering indie games clamouring to show off their new ideas - with varying degrees of success - but Enemy Front's gameplay just doesn't seem to have a single original idea in its head.

And really, what's a game like this even doing with a multiplayer mode? Oh yes, the moment I get home I just can't wait to get some mates together and play our favourite game, Enemy Front! Nobody could have possibly looked at this game and honestly thought it was going to take the world by storm, so why implement a feature that relies so heavily on lots of people owning it? This is as token as it gets; a checkbox ticked on some deluded manager's paperwork. Even if you are the kind of person who likes this style of gameplay, why would you play this when Call of Duty does everything it does with about a hundred times the style? There are three multiplayer modes and four maps – slow down guys, don't overload us with content or anything – with the modes consisting of Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and something called Radio Transmission, which is essentially a reskinned 'capture the points' mode with a few extra rules thrown in. As for how it actually functions, I can't say for certain. Word evidently gets around fast, since nobody seemed to actually be playing.

So let's return to the bit that actually does have some potential: the story. Just as a word of warning, I'm going to write a bit about the ending here, so if this review has hyped you up for this game so effectively that you can't bear to have it spoiled for you - this is the point where I wish I did video reviews, just so I could drape that sentence in a thick sheet of sarcasm - then I suggest that you skip to the next paragraph. After things going just rosy for the entire game, just before the final mission it turns out that this isn't actually alternate-history fiction, and that the Nazis really are going to bulldoze the resistance after all. Wait, what? We just won every single conflict with them that I've been in, and now you're telling me that we're all going to die? Fine, let's get on with the thrilling, futile climax. What will it be? A desperate last-stand in the ruins of a town square? One final ill-fated battle that really drives home the horrific inevitability of being slowly crushed by the iron boot of a monstrous war machine? Erm, no. What actually happens is that you fight your way through two or three buildings, get on a rowing boat with your Polish friend, and escape. I'm not questioning the legitimacy of the tactic, but as far as anti-climactic endings go it's right up there with just having the credits roll halfway down a corridor. No big battle, just a scripted sequence and one last Panzerfaust kill for good measure.

And now we get to my favourite part. You see, my most memorable moments in Enemy Front were not spent in the set-pieces, nor in the cutscenes, nor even in the times when the gameplay got halfway exciting. The parts I remember most vividly were the bugs. Sure, the multiple loading screen crashes were probably the most severe, but they didn't rattle me half as much as the cutscenes where the video simply failed to load, causing me at one point to stare at a black screen with unaccompanied audio for nearly a minute before wising up to the issue. Neither were quite as treacherous as the level geometry, though, which I somehow managed to get repeatedly stuck in. But I was not the only actor in this tragedy to fall prey to this bug, oh no! At one point, after surviving a battle that seemed unusually difficult, I scouted around and found a truck full of resistance members - ostensibly my backup - wedged awkwardly under a bridge in a manner I normally associate with badly-made Garry's Mod contraptions, an image that was swiftly completed when I brushed up against it and was instantly killed. And you can't just climb onto a ledge any more in video games, can you? It has to be a button prompt and a pre-animated sequence, both located at a very specific point on the wall, and if somebody misplaces a line of code somewhere then I guess half the time you just can't climb onto that ledge, sonny. See, this wouldn't have happened if you'd just implemented crouch-jumping, would it?

Overall Enemy Front just strikes me as a very unambitious game. Everything it does is technically competent - except all the bugs, but whatever - but I can't recall a single time when it did something and I thought “oh, that's cool.” Whenever I finish a game, I'm usually left with a sense that it has, in some small way, advanced gaming as a whole, either by successfully pulling off at least one new idea or being so blisteringly awful that everybody knows not to do the same thing again. Enemy Front is one of the few games that hasn't done either of those. By these standards, it's a truly worthless game, but judging it under those conditions is hardly fair. It works. It's not clever, deep, original, or particularly well-polished, but it will transport you six or seven hours into the future without planting you into the dirt. Perhaps a game that sets out with a modest goal - and I mean really modest - but more or less achieves it should be applauded in the face of the empty promises that every big release makes, or - no, I think I prefer ridiculous ideas. Let's go back to cross-country love stories and quirky roguelikes next time around, alright?