You’ll regularly be called upon to grab the usual gun turrets, or pick up the usual rocket launchers to shoot the usual tanks, or engage in the usual obligatory stealth sections. While interesting ideas are malformed and dropped, trite and long-overplayed ones are repeated all the time. You can just start doing that on preordained surfaces now. Over halfway through the game, you gain the option to draw chalk symbols on the wall for no real reason. Enemy Front loves weird things like this – ideas that are half-introduced, or dropped at a moment’s notice. Oddly, after this illusion of player agency, the game drops the premise almost entirely, settling into more linear progression while only occasionally offering optional objectives during levels that only occasionally offer a tangible reward. This choice is something of an obfuscation, since you’ll end up doing them all regardless and only really get to choose which mission is played first. When it first begins, Enemy Front makes things a little interesting by allowing you to choose your missions. He’s in Europe during the second World War, and he’s shooting German soldiers for the resistance because that’s what you do. The paper-thin story revolves around a journalist whose name I’ve forgotten because it isn’t important. It is a World War II first-person shooter, that much is true, but it feels like it could have been released more than five years ago and fit right in.
In fairness, CI Games’ tale of Reich and resistance neither feels truly modern or particularly fun. Enemy Front aims to do just that, claiming to be the “first truly modern WW2 FPS” and promising to make the murder of Nazis fun again. So allegedly dead is the horse, World War II titles should be able to stand out thanks to the endless modern military shooters and zombie games that rose to take their place. You can spot and mark enemies using binoculars, though the tagging system is buggy and fails to tag at times.At a time in which World War II shooters were considered passe years ago, a World War II shooter can become king. Other guns have a white x for indicating body hits and a red one for killing shots. Zooming in through the scope shows a red reticule after a while that glows if your shot will kill. You can hold your breath to slow down time and steady your shot. Also, it’s effective at shooting environmental traps and explosive objects from afar. You will probably want to keep a sniper rifle with you at all times, since you can randomly be rewarded with a kill cam of your shots. Sneaking lets you kill guards silently or take them hostage, to finish off after the clip in your revolver empties. The game has a stealth system with an enemy detection meter, though you usually end up going in all guns blazing after trying to sneak around unsuccessfully. Bullets can travel through bodies to let you score multikills in the same shot. There are Door Breaching sequences with bullet time following, though your gun starts shooting just as slowly as the time is moving, thereby negating the potential advantage. You have Grenades and Molotov Cocktails, which have their own separate key bindings, as well as time bombs that can only be placed in certain locations. There are a variety of weapons on offer though you will only come across 2 or 3 of them in any level, either from enemy drops or from certain locations. Gameplay-wise, you have ammo crates scattered around the place with replenishing health. More gorgeous effects courtesy of CryEngine