Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Great multiplayer"

Battlefield has been the best multiplayer game in the military vehicle combat games with lots of players in one match. It is only natural that other companies will try to create games like that in order to cash in. Well here comes Frontlines. From the makers of a popular mod for Battlefield 2, Frontlines goes for the heart and tries to do a little extra. But how good is the game.
The story behind Frontlines is that oil is scarce and people need to fight over it. China and Russia have formed together and have declared war on America. The story actually has a good premise and if it was better told, could have been something special in a sea full of military shooters.
One of the main selling points of Frontlines is it actually has a single player as oppose to just a bot mode. Well it does have a single player; it is just a tiny step up from a bot mode. You follow a group of soldiers around as they complete missions. The story is told through a camera man as he experiences the battles being fought. But unfortunately, you care for any of the characters. The game treats the single player like a multiplayer. Whenever you die, you just spawn as another random soldier. This gives it a bot mode like feel, especial since the story seems nonexistent throughout the gameplay.
The weapons and vehicles are you standard set of weapons and vehicles with a futuristic look to them. But the thing that makes frontlines a little different is the drones. You have some that are like RC cars with machine guns and some that are little helicopters. These are actually quite fun to use and offer a little change to the standard combat.
Graphically Frontlines isn't very impressive. While the game doesn't look bad, there isn't much that shines. The environments don't look that good and the character models don't look very good.
The sound in Frontlines sounds great and gives you the feeling of being in a big conflict. Things blowing up around you and bullets whizzing by your head sound great.
Multiplayer is the strongest point of Frontlines. There is one mode on the disk and another you can download. The one on the disk is called Frontlines. Your team has to capture certain places on the battlefield to move a line up. It plays out like a big game of tug of war where players are constantly taking and retaking control points in order to push the other team off the map. The other mode is a conquest mode like in the Battlefield games where you have to capture and hold a bunch of places spread out throughout the map. The multiplayer is a lot of fun and the high player count adds to the excitement, but there is one big problem with it. Frontlines runs on dedicated servers, but at sometimes you feel like you aren't playing on a dedicated server. The game has lots of lag, and at times I found it really hard to finish the match because the game runs so laggy. But if you find a good game with no lag then the game can be a lot of fun.
Overall, Frontlines is a good multiplayer game. If you are looking for a single player experience then I would look else where.