Frontlines: Fuel of War

It's hard to believe that when the original Battlefield 1942 was released it was considered to be a risky game. A huge multiplayer oriented title with lots of weapons, vehicles and massive outdoor maps? Yet the Digital Illusions created title was a huge best seller as were its three follow up games (Battlefield: Vietnam, Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142). Now publisher THQ is working on its own variation of the Battlefield formula with Frontlines: Fuel of War and at a recent press event we got a chance to go hands-on with the PC and Xbox 360 versions of the game.

Frontlines is being developed by the new THQ owned Kaos Studios, made up of the former members of Trauma Studios who first created the Desert Combat free mod for Battlefield 1942 and then got acquired by Digital Illusions. The New York City based team worked on Battlefield 2 but were shut down when EA bought Digital Illusions. Now the team is on their own and working on Frontlines, taking the lessons learned from the Battlefield games and putting their own unique twists on the genre.

One of those twists is that Frontlines, unlike the previously released Battlefield games, will have an actual storyline and single player campaign. In a nutshell the game is set in the near future and deals with a very timely subject; the diminishing oil reserves. In Frontline's future of a couple of decades from now, Russia and China have teamed up to form the Red Star Alliance. Your character in the single player campaign is naturally playing with the "good guys", the Western Coalition who are fighting the Red Star Alliance for control of the last of the active oil deposits.

We got to see a portion of the single player campaign during the press event where your character joins the Stray Dogs Division to fight the enemy on the ground. Basically the single player campaign isn't going to be a series of bot battles but will have a number of different objectives to accomplish (take out enemy installations, retrieve important data, etc). The game will have a bunch of destructible environments so that wall that in normal games would be unaffected by a rocket launcher could easily shatter into pieces. While our glimpse into the single player portion of the game was brief it did give us an idea on how Frontlines will make us care about the situations we will find ourselves in the game.