By Anthony Swinnich on April 19th, 2008

Frontlines is set in the near future, but it seems like most of the arsenal was picked up at "The Gaming Cliché Surplus Store." A bevy of high-powered lead-spitters and rocket-flingers await your itchy trigger fingers. The good news is that they all function admirably. The better news is there are other weapons called drones that help spice up combat.

Drones are exactly what they sound like: little robots you control from another location. Drones come in three wonderful flavors. You’re given access to a miniature helicopter, a tiny car and a cute little tank. The helicopters come equipped with either a machine gun or a rocket launcher, or serve as a flying mine ready to detonate at your discretion. They’re also perfect for recon since enemies have a pretty difficult time taking them down before you get a lay of the land.

The game makes use of the Unreal 3 engine, so it’s no surprise that it’s a looker. It’s just a shame the environments are so typical. Factories and blown-out towns are where war is fought, but that doesn’t make them any less ordinary. Of course beauty is only skin-deep, and the level design more than makes up for the drab exterior. The environments allow for a shocking amount of tactical possibility. Unlike many games in the genre, impassible sandbags or other obstacles don’t block off alleyways and other paths. If there are multiple buildings in a village, you can run between any or all of them to flank your enemies, sometimes even cutting through them. It’s also a lot of fun to climb as high as you can to pick enemies off more casually; a process brought to you by ladders, sniper rifles and grenade launchers. It would be nice if the AI wasn’t so bipolar, but it’s better than poking your head up and getting sniped every single time.

The objectives in the campaign are all fairly straightforward. It’s either blow this up or capture that post, but the levels are so fun to explore that it’s more about the journey than the destination. This also applies to the 50-person multiplayer mode, though the objectives there are slightly more difficult to read. The action seemed to run without much lag though, and the battlefields were filled with folks to frag even in the spacious maps.

There are few complaints to be had with Frontlines overall (the vehicles can be a bitch to get a hang of), but the setting really keeps it from achieving true notoriety. If you can look past the initial feelings of "been there done that," you’ll find an engaging campaign with a particularly roomy multiplayer mode.