Frontlines: Fuel of War - hands-on

The first mission started out in a Middle Eastern town. You and your team of meat-head soldier buddies make an emergency landing and immediately fall under attack. Your bros start yelling things, and since there are literally thousands of lines of dialogue, so do your enemies. Occasionally you'll even hear things that are specific and helpful. In a later mission, we were assaulting a Red Star Alliance HQ, and just before we we're blown-up, the guy next to us shouted something along the lines of, "there's a Red Star soldier with a rocket launcher in the window on the right." And there was.

Along with hearing everyone talk, you'll be seeing them fight. Ordinarily you can look left or right and see soldiers exchanging fire, missiles flying overhead, tanks blasting through buildings or whatever else you would expect to see. Even though, in the unfinished build of the game we played, friendly soldiers would sometimes ignore the shotgun blasting Red Star soldier standing right next to them and justhang out and look at us. We imagine that'll be fixed up for the release.

Even in the first level we were immediately given three objectives that needed to be dealt with, and no particular one seemed to be the obvious best choice. More than that, there was no particular way through the town that anyone seemed to think was a good idea.At leastuntil our first path ran us into a tank and a wall of machine gun fire.After that,we had a pretty good idea of at least one path that was not the best choice. We decided to get up on a roof and try to go around, which worked much better.