Weapons are so inaccurate that it's hard to tell if it's a deliberate attempt to recreate the capabilities of vintage firearms or just wonky physics. You'll often be accompanied by NPC allies who do absolutely nothing of value in combat. The temptation to simply give up is strong, since the reward for perseverance is so meagre. Die and you may find yourself replaying most of a level. In retrospect, the boot-up screen's declaration that the game was "achieved with CryEngine" begins to sound downright sarcastic.Ĭheckpoints are brutal, often placed before long and unbroken sequences of cut-scenes, battles and stealth. Throughout the game, textures are low-quality, models are crude and cut-scenes are smothered in compression artefacts. Meanwhile, doctors and nurses go through the motions, wandering backwards and forwards, dutifully picking up and carrying invisible objects from one place to another. In a hospital scene later in the game, wounded soldiers writhe in agony, their bodies vanishing through the blood-stained stretchers as they roll around. I replayed one section four times and every time the same patrolling guard would slide around in place, standing and crouching over and over like a demented Cossack dancer. Characters constantly get stuck in place or locked into weird animation loops. It seems like there's a 50/50 chance as to whether sound effects will trigger at the right time. You'll enter an empty room only for the furniture to suddenly appear a few seconds later. Similar catastrophic bugs, glitches and quirks persist throughout the game. In the process, the animation pushes us through the solid second-storey wall of the building we're in and both myself and the deceased soldier fall to the pavement outside. Things get off to a bad start when, in the very first level, in the first minutes of play, I creep up on a Nazi to perform a stealth kill.
The game looks nothing like this on Xbox 360, by the way. Enemy Front looks up at you like an emaciated puppy and you look back with a heavy heart, knowing you're going to have to throw it in the river. Those flaws are simply too numerous and too damaging for leniency, however. It's an underdog, a game you want to cheer on despite its many, many groaning flaws. This is a game where you can see budgetary limitations as visible stretchmarks on the screen - scars left from a valiant but ultimately doomed attempt to straddle the gap between the game the developers wanted to make and the game their resources and abilities would allow. That's a category that Enemy Front, a Polish-developed World War 2 shooter, should fit into. Cheap games, offbeat games, but often more interesting games than those that must justify their enormous budgets by appealing to as many people as possible. The blockbusters' attention has shifted to the shiny new toys, leaving a massive audience of existing console owners more readily accessible to games that would previously have been lost in the crush.
I've said it before, and I'll no doubt say it again in another five years or so, but this is my favourite part of a console generation.
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