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Frontline Command

Frontline Command is an almost nondescript World War II RTS that feels like another attempt to cash in on the Saving Private Ryan/Battlefield 1942 trend. The perpetrator this time is Bitmap Brothers, the London based developers of Z. Or "Zed", as they call it over there.

The campaign consists of a series of missions ranging from the Allied move into Normandy to their assault on the Eagle's Nest at the end of the war. You can play as the Axis in multiplayer games; there are no plans for a skirmish mode against the computer, so single player games are Allies only. An updated version of the Z2 engine is being used to render the tiny little units in 3D, but you can zoom in for a closer look. Infantry is arranged into squads that scurry around as a group of men, but they're controlled as a single unit. And then you got your tanks and your gun emplacements and your trucks, all of which pretty much have to be controlled individually. This is a game about tactically placing your units rather than drag selecting groups.

Those Nazis always know which houses to occupy.

Cemetery skirmish.

Um sir, why are we defending a giant windmill?.

Units have health bars and morale dots floating over their heads. A little pie chart counts down the time before a gun is reloaded. The morale dots are important because when a unit's morale breaks, it will cower and ignore your orders. Conversely, if a unit's morale is really high, a medal floats above it to indicate that it might commit heroic deeds, like charging a machine gun nest. In other words, extreme morale states might make the player superfluous as units act on their own.

There's no base building, probably because you'll need to be so hands-on with your men and vehicles. For instance, there's a detailed line of sight model that works kind of like the lighting in Diablo: you can see it radiating out and pouring around corners and obstacles. One feature of this is that you're supposed to be able to position your units in blind spots and give them ambush orders. Your commander has the special ability to look farther with his binoculars, but you have to manually activate this ability to sweep away the fog of war as if you were using a broom. Guns have to be limbered and towed to be moved. Men have to be put in the back of trucks. You tell your little dudes when to go prone and when to stand up. This is all in real time, without the ability to pause or change the speed. Westwood would love this game.