Product Reviews

If you're after a single-player or multiplayer first-person shooter, you're currently spoilt for choice. One new contender, Frontlines: Fuel of War, tries to cater to everyone by offering both an extensive story-driven single-player campaign and vast 64-player online battles.

Set in the near future, Frontlines charts the conflict between two new superpowers, the Western Coalition Army and the Red Star Alliance, as they battle over oil reserves.

In the single-player campaign you play as a member of an elite team of Spec Ops soldiers fighting on the conflict's frontlines. Shadowed by a journalist who narrates

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a set of high-quality, post-mission cut scenes, you must capture enemy-held resource fields and repel your foe's incursions into your territory.

At first, the game's visceral, intense action promises much, but it soon becomes apparent that behind the mayhem lies a fairly threadbare shooter. While levels are relatively open-ended, they're also highly repetitive, with one identikit gunfight after another. Bugs, such as vehicles getting stuck behind invisible barriers, also wear your interest thin.

The titanic multiplayer action - in which you and your comrades battle to capture strategic points on a map - is superior to the single-player game. But despite some brutal online battles involving infantry, tanks, jeeps, anti-aircraft batteries, gunships and jets, there simply isn't enough originality to challenge Unreal Tournament III.

The option to choose battlefield roles and upgradable specialist skills has been done better elsewhere - in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, for example - and the lack of game modes ensures that any enjoyment is short-lived.

Frontlines promises much, but fails to deliver. It's unlikely to make much of an impact in the overcrowded first-person shooter genre.