War live. Enemy Front. Pragmatism versus idealism Enemy front reviews
Game tested on PC
The next announcement from City Interactive is unlikely to cause a surge of enthusiasm, especially after the extremely weak Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2. However, persistent developers have been poring over Enemy Front all this time, trying once again to break the curse of the “Polish shooter”. The project took three whole years to create - it should be noted that the time was not wasted.
⇡ Freedom fighters
In recent years, the theme of World War II has been extremely unpopular in the action genre, but is now gaining momentum again. Most recently, the fervently fantastic Wolfenstein: The New Order died down, and looms on the horizon Sniper Elite 3, in which we will go to the vastness of Africa. Enemy Front illuminates this sad page in human history from a side unusual for virtual entertainment. No landings in Normandy, battles near Moscow or the capture of the Reichstag. Instead, the team selected places and battles that had not previously been covered by the gaming industry, but also took place in history. The author, unfortunately, is not an expert in this field, so I cannot say to what extent the phrase “based on real events” can be applied to the project.
The story will be about Robert Hawkins, a military journalist covering the horrors of war. For a good half of the game we will have to watch the preparations, and then become a direct participant in the Warsaw Uprising. The city is almost completely in ruins. Enemy Front is not about grandiose clashes, but about the actions of the resistance, along with which our protagonist will have to literally gnaw out every building, every street, every square meter of land from the Nazis.
An enemy ammunition depot was blown up. It's a pity that this has absolutely no effect on anything
City Interactive did a good job of creating a depressing mood. These are not the jingoistic first releases of Call of Duty or the deliberately tragic Brothers in Arms. This is a sad story about the choices that every person must make. It is told without much gloss, a big budget or a Hollywood production, but it is precisely this simplicity and spontaneity that captivates. In those moments when the Nazis loosen their grip and the sky ceases to be red and gray from explosions, Robert tells his story - how he ended up in the resistance, where he learned to deftly wield a rifle and a machine gun. During these flashbacks, we will be taken to France, Norway, and even to the very rear of the enemy - to a secret base in Germany.
The landscapes of France are deceptively calm
⇡ Guerrilla reporter
The war will have to be waged largely by guerrilla methods. The creators tried to diversify as much as possible game process and move away from the concept of a scripted attraction. Running madly with MP 38 at the ready will not work: Hawkins is not particularly durable or speedy. If you prefer an aggressive approach, then be sure to use cover. It lacks the realistic shooting sensations inherent in Starbreeze projects. The dynamics of the character's movement are conveyed well, but using weapons is not so pleasant. Overall it turned out better than in some old Call of Duty, but not as good as we would like.
You can do a little smarter than just copying Rambo. Enemy Front adopted some of the mechanics from the studio's previous project, Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2. You can find an advantageous position on the ground, lie down near a tree and shoot Wehrmacht soldiers with a sniper rifle. There is no need to adjust for the wind - you just need to take into account the speed of the bullet, and then savor well-aimed hits in slow motion. It’s not as beautiful as in Sniper Elite V2, but I don’t want to swear at all. On the other hand, you can sneak into the enemy camp as an unnoticed shadow, killing enemies one by one.
We will spend half the game in such scenery
City Interactive has put a lot of features into the game. For example, sneaking up on a Fritz from behind, Robert can use him as a human shield and fire back with a pistol. Loud sounds can mask shots, allowing our hero to remain undetected without using a silencer. Sometimes it is even allowed to cause an accident for some unlucky warriors, say, by dropping a cargo container on them or releasing the brakes of a truck on a hill. The developers practically do not limit the ways of passing. The maps are spacious, with several routes to the goal, so there is plenty of room to turn around. Sometimes nonlinearity even appears and you are allowed to choose the further course of the task.
But, unfortunately, the creators do not push us to experiment. There are not so many opponents, and you don’t have to be particularly sophisticated. Slipping past the patrol is not a problem, which is why any sense of sabotage and planning is lost. The idea with secondary tasks, which are encountered every now and then during missions, also remains unclear. For example, in a destroyed city you can meet a group of prisoners who are about to be shot. There is an opportunity to intervene and make noise, or to pass by. But this will not affect the further narrative or the game situation in any way. In general, all these explosions of anti-aircraft guns with tanks and the theft of secret documents are not motivated by anything - it’s not for the sake of knocking out “achievements” to do this.
Enemy Front also has multiplayer, which is doomed to be completely empty in the near future. From three modes I managed to try only two: classic Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch. This is a standard online add-on, as is often the case in such games, but the guerrilla motif and wide maps borrowed from the plot part add their own flavor. On the one hand, death can wait at any window, and on the other, after the first successful kill you have to urgently change your position, because your victim will soon come for revenge. Good entertainment for the evening, but nothing outstanding.
In the end, the developers still include “a little Call of Duty”
Enemy Front was a pleasant surprise. Your humble servant, to be honest, did not expect anything good from the project. Perhaps due to the lack of expectations, he gave pleasant emotions. After all, this is a rather fascinating and unusual story for the chosen setting, albeit told with limited funds. What’s important is that it is head and shoulders above City Interactive’s previous works.
Advantages:
- a look at World War II from a new perspective for games;
- varied gameplay that strives to get away from the “rails”;
- The dynamics of the hero's movements are well conveyed.
Flaws:
- there are not enough incentives to experiment during the passage;
- sluggish shooter mechanics;
- pointless side quests.
| Graphic arts | Don't look at the CryEngine 3 logo - beauty of the corresponding level Enemy games Front cannot demonstrate. The picture is quite typical for shooters mediocre, but sometimes there are very nice panoramas. | 7 |
| Sound | Bombs thunder, bullets whistle overhead, and in particularly tense moments the music tries to build up the atmosphere. The developers have done a good job, but it’s difficult to note anything outstanding. | 6 |
| Single player game | An unexpectedly fun shooter that allows you to play in different styles - from open confrontation to covert operations. Each element is well thought out, but Enemy Front fails to generate interesting situations: the enemies are stupid, there are few of them, and the spacious maps are stingy with events. | 7 |
| Group game | Guerrilla warfare with other people can keep you busy for a couple of evenings. The modes are banal, but due to good body physics and complex multi-level maps, it’s interesting to play. | 7 |
| General impression | Enemy Front was a big step forward for City Interactive. This is a thoughtful and atmospheric shooter that lacks only budget and production. If the developers continue in the same spirit, they will one day make it to the big leagues. | 7 |
Enemy Front
Video:
If we draw a parallel between game maker Stuart Black and multidisciplinary filmmaker Uwe Boll (a fairly popular analogy in the press), it becomes clear that the tasks and motives of these subjects - scandalous, irrepressible, enterprising creators - are very different.
The creator of vile parodies of exploitation movies (BloodRayne, Postal), as you know, is ready to give film critics a bad time at any moment, but in general he is very calm about his craft. A couple of scenes from Ball's films or even a couple of vivid quotes from his interviews are enough to understand that the German is just having fun with the camera.
Black, at one time, successfully came out with an eclectic shooter about the destruction of everything and everyone ( Black on PS2), strictly follows a personal creative vector. His goal is to create an extremely spectacular, rhythmically controlled, impeccably stylish action movie. Almost to restore the genre.
So, in 2011, he tried to slightly replay the Black show program. It turned out disgusting for a number of reasons.
For his new attempt, the author, already listed as part of the Polish City Interactive(now CI Games), decided to almost reinvent himself. he conceived it as a shooter about the Second World War (instead of his beloved local conflicts in the near future). At the same time, it was assumed that here, in contrast to and, there would be no nods to Spielberg’s film work, but there would be plot elements from the military film classics of the 1970s - for example, “The Dirty Dozen” with Lee Marvin. Plus the classic set of Stuart Black's ambitions as a progressive game designer.
Two years after starting work on Enemy Front, Stuart Black left the project due to creative differences with the studio management.
Extreme report
The backstory of Enemy Front is worth attention not only because the context in which the so-called “Polish shooters” appear is often several times more interesting than these shooters. The point here is rather that the game in many ways resembles a draft version of some brighter, more significant work. Quite possibly, just the failed magnum opus of Stuart Black.
Destructibility in the game works, let's say, selectively: you can completely demolish a wooden fence, but you will never shoot through the wall of a wooden booth.
In terms of the script from the initial ideas (something like Wolfenstein minus the frivolous intonation) only the general scale remains. The lens shows an episode from the life of journalist Roy Hawkins, who went to the front for a loud sensation (not too much, as the game emphasizes, thinking about morality and spiritual matters in general), but found himself involved in a long-term struggle side by side with resistance units.
The allies here, as expected, huddle in the gloomy sewer tunnels, mark the walls of dilapidated buildings with their symbols (at least Hawkins himself can do this), and also convincingly encourage the protagonist with the phrase “kill as many fascists on your way as you can.” Or they ask him to tell something from his life - a professional journalist in the thick of the battles of the Second World War arouses keen interest among his comrades, of course.
Unexpectedly, those popular thanks to Call of Duty fit into Enemy Front successfully: Modern Warfare gameplay scenes when you sharply knock down a door and kill everyone inside the room in rapid succession.
Ultimately, it is the flashback sequences that show us Hawkins' early military exploits that somehow justify the hero's movement across the map of Europe. Against the backdrop of idyllic pictures of the French countryside (see Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” on this topic), we try to survive among German patrols, darting from fences to carts and nervously raising a pistol (the only weapon available at first) at the slightest sign of danger. Then we will organize sabotage in the Lu River valley, mining railway. Afterwards, we carefully hunt the Nazis in the ruins of the fortress.
Lyrical digressions are conversations with the strong-willed woman Josephine Aubrac, who most of all loves to reproach the hero for blatant careerism and, by the way, is almost the only one of all the minor characters who has at least some significance for the modest local drama.
The best parts of sniper sequences are the moments when the camera follows the fired bullet and you see in detail how the projectile hits the victim.
Outside of the aforementioned episodes, the game is literally molded from problems of various sizes.
For example, taking advantage of the fact that events take several years, the scriptwriters drive Hawkins from one country to another, not caring to provide a logical basis for these travels. And for a large-scale military drama, such an approach is tantamount to disaster.
At the same time, in different locations we are essentially doing the same routine. There is exactly one clear difference between the defense of St. Cross Church and the mission in the Oscarsborg fortress: in the second case, we are trusted to shoot at planes for half a minute from anti-aircraft gun. Everything else is purely visual inconsistencies, different sets props.
The situation does not change much even at the final level, which in any part of the same Call of Duty would be a frankly insignificant, intermediate episode. During the seven hours of playthrough, almost nothing is remembered.
On two fronts
Behind all this, faintly, but still noticeable are traces of something potentially fascinating: there seems to be a scale, some good images of the characters (especially Hawkins himself), and there are touching scenes. With the gameplay, oddly enough, it’s exactly the same offensive story.
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| Thanks to CryEngine 3, the game turned out to be at least pretty. Particularly successful various kinds visual effects and explosions. | Almost all of your allies act extremely indifferent. Both in terms of drama and on the battlefield. |
Enemy Front suggests solving most of the problems in one of two obvious ways - quickly shoot everyone (just remember that the cover system here is old-fashioned, and the abundance of ammunition is often deceptive) or try to secretly reach the target, from time to time distracting the next enemy with a stone throw.
What often hinders one from leaning towards the second option is that, despite the spacious levels providing several paths, the stealth in the game is still primitive, and after three or four enemies neutralized from behind, there is no longer any patience left for silent maneuvers - you want to urgently kill all living things Mauser.
This is indeed somewhat more convenient, although shooting is associated with problems of a different kind. On large maps For some time, the enemies manage to imitate intelligence: they practice flanking, blind fire, and unexpected frontal attacks. But as soon as, for example, you sit in a corner on the first floor of a building, a real show begins: soldiers, naturally, in a line crawl into a narrow passage to instantly die under your fire. You can simply keep your finger on the mouse button.
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| The multiplayer in the game is inexpressive and quite classic, but this is not so much a minus: online battles will bring back memories of online battles in the first Call parts of Duty. | Location of control points is another one headache. You are not allowed to use equipment, so after death you often have to run almost a kilometer to the place. |
In other words, in both cases the player stumbles over critical flaws, although in theory everything sounds like a win-win fusion of gameplay components (Black himself called it one of his guidelines two years ago) and. And how do CI Games manage to embody seemingly brilliant ideas in the form of a pair of mechanics somehow glued together and poorly implemented?
The Polish studio CI Games is far from new to gaming industry. For the past twelve years, it has been trying, without much success, to win the hearts of players by releasing its low-budget Class B action films. Legends are slowly forming around them, and some players have even dubbed such projects “Polish half-baked shooters.” Having played many of their games, there is a strange feeling that time has no power over the developers, as if they were stuck somewhere in the early 2000s and still cannot understand that global trends have changed a lot, and the gaming community is no longer willing to play stupid games shooting for a couple of hours. Unfortunately, the studio's latest long-suffering creation is a first-person shooter Enemy Front not much different from the previous works of Polish masters.
When the game was first announced three years ago and they said in passing that the development was being done by Stuart Black himself, the creator of the excellent first-person shooter Black, everyone was slightly euphoric and expected to get a solid action movie, the main action of which takes place during the Second World War. As time passed, the project acquired the first details and videos with gameplay, and it seemed that just a little more and we would get one of the best representatives of its genre. The developers made loud promises about an open world and non-linear progression, interesting stealth and the difficult fate of the main character. But everything came to an abrupt end in 2012, when Mr. Black told the studio to go to hell, packed his bags and sailed from Poland back to his native States. What happened? It turns out that the heads of the studio did not like the game prototype created by a famous designer and they decided to completely rewrite the plot, replace the main character and generally rethink the entire gameplay based on open world and the complex artificial intelligence of the Krauts. Well, what happened next was what Mr. Black said before loudly slamming the door - the developers followed the lead of the masses and decided to make low-quality “consumer goods”, which they released on the market.
So, the main character is not a Pole, as was originally planned, but the American war correspondent Robert Hawkins, who went through fire, water and copper pipes, visited the Moon and fought in an unequal battle with Adolf Hitler himself... wait, excuse me, I took the script of one great episode about the machinations of the Third Reich, but no matter how funny it may sound, the protagonist of Enemy Front is no different from the same Blazkovich of Wolfenstein 3D or the immortal Captain Price from the very first part of Call of Duty. Why so categorical? Because the last two fit harmoniously into the concept of their series, but Hawkins did not. The frail writer somehow miraculously walked through almost all of Europe, slaughtered hundreds of Nazis, blew up dozens of tanks, and even mined a secret base for the production of V2 missiles. How, when and for what did he do all this? For the sake of a common victory or a successful shot that could end up on the front page of who knows what newspaper? And why then did the Warsaw Uprising lose if they had this “Rambo” on their side? And so many such questions accumulate end credits, that you don’t even know what to do with this tasteless mess of epic moments, seasoned with tragic inserts showing all the cruelty of the Nazi machine towards the common population different countries. And, if it had not been presented with such pathos as in this game, where each mission begins with a sugary speech by the main character, which should raise the morale of the Poles living in occupied Warsaw and prepare them for an uprising against the Third Reich, but instead has the completely opposite effect. It irritates the ear and there is no doubt that if there had been a real Polish resistance, Mr. Hawkins would have long been taken away from the microphone and given a couple of slaps in the face for arrogance, and maybe he would have been thrown into a real battle, after which he would hardly have survived. All these episodes frankly spoil the overall picture, distracting players from the Polish uprising itself. The narrative itself is very uneven, throwing the overall plot from side to side and not letting you really understand what the hell happened and when this obscenity will end. Ugly short production videos cannot please you with either high-quality direction or well-animated characters. It’s good, at least the tragic ending of the Warsaw Uprising was not rewritten and everything was left as it really was, without flags proudly planted on the bodies of the fallen Brown Shirts and the joyful dancing of handsome Polish men with Americans on their corpses.
As for the gameplay, things aren't much better. At first, it seems that the developers are having a hard time giving you a choice when completing a task, that there is at least some difference between blowing up a weapons warehouse and freeing hostages. But after completing the first mission, this feeling quickly disappears, replaced by the stupid realization that all levels are linear. It seems that the locations are large, and the hero can quietly sneak through the bushes to Nazi soldiers and officers in order to cut the latter’s throats or take them as a human shield. You are even allowed to drag bodies and throw stones to distract enemies with noise. However, all this frankly does not work, because there are very few enemies in large open areas, and there are practically no interesting game situations. So in half an hour active play you just don’t give a damn about everything, pick up a bigger gun and start a real bloodbath. But here, too, the developers made a mistake: the weapons and grenades are almost endless, since boxes of ammunition are scattered everywhere, the hero himself is also distinguished by enviable health, he is almost impossible to kill. The Fritz, in turn, shoot back with a bang and without any particular problems, while showing their weakness and stupidity in comparison with the brave Yankees. They don’t really know how to hide behind cover, they throw grenades in your direction without much enthusiasm, and if you try to get around them, they won’t even realize that you’ve been crawling behind them for a long time. There are a lot of weapons, but they all shoot very clumsily, making faint sounds, as if you weren’t holding them in your hands. As a result, dynamic battles quickly turn into a boring action that you want to quickly skip. Occasionally, developers insert scenes with knocking out front doors with a horde of Nazis behind it: however, such a carbon copy of Call of Duty looks cheap and not very beautiful, especially when you see the faces of your enemies, who, when they see you, take on such unnatural expressions as if they were only that they tortured for a long time and painfully. There are missions in the game where it is best to use sniper rifles, but here Enemy Front is much inferior to the studio’s previous project Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2, dedicated to the difficult everyday life of a lonely sniper. In the end, the single-player campaign flies before your eyes in 5-6 hours at the highest difficulty level and somehow you don’t want to ask for more. If you still want to stay a little longer in the virtual capital of Poland, then you always have multiplayer at your disposal. True, there are practically no players there, and there are only three game modes: the developers limited themselves to standard Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and an analogue of “King of the Hill” - Radio Transmission. You can drive one evening, but no more.
The newfangled CryEngine 3 engine is responsible for the graphical side of Enemy Front, but the game is disgusting on consoles: terrible textures, low resolution and a poorly designed color rendering system make the picture too bright and unpleasant for the eye. But there are no special complaints about the location designers. France is replete with fields of red poppies and cute little villages, a Norwegian storm intimidates with its deadly cold, one moonlit night in the very heart of Germany lulls your gaze, and burning Warsaw makes you remember that you are, after all, on the front line, where people are constantly dying. And yes, the soundtrack is lackluster and unmemorable, it feels like the game is playing at most two melodies per fret and they don’t allow you to be fully involved in the events happening around you.
If Enemy Front had been released ten years ago, it could have been called a good representative of its genre, but today this project looks too archaic, taking a little from all other shooters about the Second World War, while forgetting to add something from myself. A sub-drama and a sub-action film, trying to somehow get out of one of the most tragic pages in the history of Poland. We were promised to show the real tragedy of one people, their unsuccessful attempts to be free, both from the Third Reich and from the Soviet regime, but what we received was an average shooter, which we didn’t even want to take on. It would seem that the guys had everything: time, an interesting fragment from the history of that terrible war, which had never been mentioned in other games on a similar topic, and a more or less adequate budget. But in the two years allotted to them, they managed to put it all somewhere and put on the market a gray unfinished prototype with a bunch of good ideas, which never received proper implementation.
The Polish studio City Interactive, mainly specializing in shooters, has repeatedly released outright slag, but sometimes it has pleased us with some pretty good games. Last year's Alien Rage, although quite controversial, still stood out from the studio’s previous projects. And now, after some time, the next creation of City Interactive is released - Enemy Front, the actions of which take place during the Second World War - a setting in Lately gaining popularity again.
The main character is Robert Hawkins, a military journalist who joined the Polish resistance in order to write a sensational article. Yes, mainly for the sake of the article, and he was not guided by any patriotic motives, although he still had personal motives. But this does not mean that you will need to sit in cover with a notepad in your hands for the entire game. No, quite the opposite - we will have to take a direct part in many heated battles, since Robert Hawkins, among other things, is also an excellent fighter who has held a weapon in his hands more than once.
We gradually learn about his past from flashback missions, which, unfortunately, sometimes only get in the way, confusing the already not the best story. But still, whatever it is, the missions themselves are quite varied. We will visit picturesque Polish villages, snow-capped mountains, and even battle-torn Warsaw. It’s just a pity that the developers didn’t add anything original to the missions: most of the gameplay elements we’ve seen in other games one way or another. Also, it would not be superfluous to mention that the locations themselves are quite extensive, and sometimes there are even forks, which adds variability to the gameplay.
But for many, the main thing in shooters is not the plot, but the gameplay, in particular the shooting. And here things are not so bad for Enemy Front. The game features quite a few weapons from the Second World War that look and behave realistically. The main thing is that you can feel the shooting itself, and you don’t get the impression that you are holding in your hands a cheap model that only vaguely resembles the original. But the sound of the shooting frankly let us down, seriously spoiling the overall impression of the shootings. The enemies in the game, as you might guess, are the Germans, or rather the Nazis, who, by the way, have no incidents with appearance didn't happen: the uniform is actually historically accurate and looks a little worn, which looks quite realistic.
Sometimes it’s interesting to just watch the enemies, listening to their conversations, jokes or arguments - in general, as you can see, the developers tried to make the opponents as alive as possible. But when it comes to shootings artificial intelligence enemies drop significantly: some Germans simply stand still, not deigning to hide in cover, some do the same, but already crouched, and those lucky ones who still hid almost always stick their heads out to show. But don’t think that because of this it will be extremely simple: enemies almost never miss, and as soon as you gape a little, you’ll already admire the inscription “You are dead,” after which you can be thrown far back, thanks to inconveniently placed checkpoints.
There is also stealth in the game, but, unfortunately, it is absolutely useless. No, well, you will most likely be able to kill several Germans quietly, but sooner or later you will still be discovered, because there are too many enemies, so there is little point in using this particular style of passing, it is much more fun to mow down the Germans the old fashioned way right and left .
The game uses the incredibly powerful CryEngine3 graphics engine, and in theory the graphics should be amazing, but that’s not the case. I don’t know how, but the Poles managed to screw this up too, because this engine is capable of more. Yes, there are beautiful places in the game that just beg to be photographed, thanks to the excellent lighting system, but mostly the graphics are frankly disappointing. And even despite the not-so-best visual component, the game sometimes slows down even on powerful hardware, and I’m generally silent about weak hardware.
Also, the game has an unforgivable number of bugs. Just imagine: you shoot, you mean, at the Germans, you shoot, but they don’t end, rod and rod, and only after a few minutes you begin to understand that something is wrong, it turns out the script is glitched, and you tried in vain not to die, in vain I spent more than twenty minutes shooting at these... So, load the last checkpoint and everything is fine, after a couple of minutes of firefight the mission continues safely. And the physics bugs... in all sorts of poses the local enemies die, sometimes even heroically hovering in the air. And, of course, it won’t be difficult to get stuck in the textures.
Frankly, last year's Alien Rage was a disaster. Boring, monotonous, in some places unreasonably complex - in general, a failure is a failure. Fortunately, the guys from City Interactive did a good job of correcting the bugs in their new creation Enemy Front. Yes, this is an ordinary average shooter with stupid opponents, not very interesting story and monotonous gameplay, captivating except for the lively shootouts, but for a Polish shooter it’s not bad at all.
Image gallery:
American journalist Robert Hawkins, sitting on the porch of a house in some godforsaken village, had no idea that he would end up in a war and become a real hero, whose name would be immortalized in alternative history textbooks!
Germany occupied the Sudetenland, Chamberlain was inactive, and on the sidelines they began to say that Poland would be next. But GG didn’t care too much about this: he, like a typical journalist, was just waiting for something new and extraordinary. He, in general, did not care about any consequences if it promised a sensation.
Enemy Front is not just a description of the everyday life of the Resistance during World War II, it is also a personal story of the character, who from a quiet and measured life ends up in real hell, the realities of which he had absolutely no idea about. The story of the metamorphosis of the character of the American journalist is a key part of Enemy Front: everything revolves around him, and everything else is just background.
The main merit of the developers from City Interactive was not the balanced and exciting gameplay, but the main character, who as the game progresses you begin to worry about and even involuntarily try on his tattered skin. Its transformation, in which the player is directly involved, is interesting to watch. This is an unusual technique for recent shooters, but it really worked.
However, the rest of the characters are not at all impersonal, as is often the case, and I’m not even talking about minor characters, speaking on our side, but rather about those with whom we have to fight - about the Germans. At first it may seem that personalized Nazis in stereotypical form and Panzerfausts behind their backs are just dummies that lie in your path in hundreds of corpses, but if you look closely and listen carefully, you can understand that this is not so. The game has interesting point, when German soldiers walk through a devastated French village and one of them expresses outright doubts about whether it was worth shooting civilians who helped the partisans. At the bar, another fascist soldier over a glass of schnapps talks about how he misses his wife, and then everyone starts joking about the crappy French drink. All these moments humanize your enemies, and you no longer shoot at models of people, but kill real soldiers, each of whom has, albeit a small, but still a story.
The big picture storyline good too. If you close your eyes to the fact that the presentation of the story is entirely dedicated to Poland, then the feeling, on the whole, is more than pleasant. Yes, you will have to fight in both France and Norway, but you will fight under the “flag” of the Home Army - the Polish resistance movement, and here everything is not so simple. On the one hand, the atmosphere is very realistic: Hawkins is doing what a Polish partisan should do - derailing trains, committing sabotage and carrying out small sweeps key points, and the rebel commanders, although superficially, say that their enemies are not only the Germans, but also the Soviet troops. On the other hand, there is a slight imbalance in the presentation of negative aspects from the history of the Home Army, such as ethnic cleansing or intra-Polish rivalry with other resistance groups. Against the backdrop of the careful depiction of the historical portrait of the Polish partisans, this looks awkward and cannot be justified by game conventions.
But Enemy Front does not forget to answer the questions that constantly arise in the player’s head. For example, half of the company can only be amazed at how the most ordinary journalist learned to handle things so masterfully firearms. IN certain moment, in one of the dialogues, Robert explains this in one succinct phrase. Often something important for understanding what is happening can be extracted from banal jokes. In general, one gets the strong impression that Polish developers are good at writing small local stories, but cannot implement them well. And in the end, if you remove the strong idea, you are left with an ordinary mediocre shooter without any frills.
Significant disadvantages include stupid opponents and their monotony, the almost complete absence of an interactive environment and bugs with textures. German soldiers behave most stupidly during stealth missions: even if Robert crawls under the enemies’ very nose and manages to hide in the bushes until the stealth scale is full, no one will raise the alarm! The same problem with quiet murders: a fascist, immersed in his lofty thoughts, will ignore the groans and pleas for help of his brother in arms, who is stabbed with a knife two steps away from him, after which he himself will meekly accept death, honestly believing that he is dying for high ideals! Finding destructible objects in Enemy Front is almost impossible: shoot at the driver at the window of a moving truck as much as you like, the glass will remain intact... however, the driver dies, which is good news!
Over time, you can even get used to the German machine guns sticking straight out of the wall and ambushing you. This, of course, has virtually no effect on the gameplay, but it is terribly annoying. What would not have been called shortcomings eight years ago now looks like a completely frivolous approach to the matter and will certainly scare away many modern gamers from the game.
Verdict
Enemy Front is a great story with mediocre execution. This is also one of those rare shooters in which the number of shootings could have been reduced. However, the Polish and Norwegian resistance are usually overlooked in WWII games, and perhaps this is the reason for you to play Enemy Front.
Final score: 6.5 points out of 10.