Gamer Value Review – Enemy Front

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Enemy Front takes us back to World War II with a serious tone. You play a journalist who is right up on the front lines with various Resistance fighters all over Europe. He joins up with each of these groups and writes down their heroic deeds, so that the world will one day know of the people who fought for freedom. That sounds like it could be the start to a pretty cool game… but that’s not at all what Enemy Front ends up being.

Enemy Front 2

First of all… this game was made with Cry Engine 3. I don’t know how this title is supposed to be something that was made with the engine that created Crysis 3. The Playstation 3 version has the visuals of a Playstation 2 game, and looks like a bunch of jumbled garbage on the screen. I usually couldn’t tell where I was going due to all the grain, and outright muddy environments that I was traversing. My first hint of fear was the very moment that the opening loading screen began to stutter, and it continued into the actual game-play sessions during auto-saves.

The frame-rate is so jumbled, that it felt like my character was constantly stumbling over rocks and trudging through sand. Even the pre-rendered cut-scenes have frame-rate issues, and I didn’t even think that was a possibility nowadays. It’s like looking straight up the crack of someone’s butt cheeks and saying, “This doesn’t look crappy at all!” The voice-acting isn’t so bad, but the sound design is questionable when it comes to combat.

I didn’t mean to get distracted from talking about the story, but it’s difficult not to with the way the game plays. The tale is all about the tragedy of war and it’s probably a story you’ve heard a dozen or so times in movies or even different games. It tries to regale you with a story about this brave journalist helping other Freedom Fighters from tyranny, but it’s so cookie-cutter that it may as well have been plucked from the library of generic storytelling. During gameplay, the story is told through random acts of kindness. See a revolutionary in trouble, save them, and move on to the next one. It’d probably be slightly interesting if the game would stop acting like it was running on Coleco Vision.

The worst part is that the frame-rate issues and grainy visuals actually impact the gameplay. Enemies have some sort of motion blur when they run, and slowdown will hinder your aim and movement during intense firefights. Hah! What am I talking about? There aren’t any real intense firefights in this game. The A.I. are crack shots, but they are dimwits who stand about waiting to be mowed down by bullets. Of course, if they didn’t do that… you probably wouldn’t be able to fight back amongst the awful technical bog.

Enemy Front 1

I’ve never really played many games where I’ve almost immediately wanted to turn them off. I actually took a fair amount of time to trudge through the disgusting lack of care paid to this title. Once I noticed that this game was $30 with a 20% of sale on Steam right after it launched, I had a distinct sensation of bile build up in my stomach. I love games that are priced under $60, but don’t try to release an Alpha build to the public and try to pretend like it’s a finished product. If anything, this game should be stinking about on Steam as an Early Access title waiting to be cancelled or polished from a turd.

It hurts me a little bit inside when I see games with a semblance of potential get neglected and released before their time. Enemy Front could have been an interesting shooter, or at least one that was worthy of budget title cult status. Instead, we get a fairly unfinished title that somehow made it through Sony’s Technical Requirement Group. Geek Citadel gives Enemy Front a DO NOT PLAY! I wouldn’t even buy this on a Steam Sale for 0.99 cents on principle. Do yourself a favor and stay as far away from Enemy Front as possible. It’s an awful cash grab and an abysmal technical performer for the Playstation 3.

*This game was provided by the publisher for review*