4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
A trip back in time - not to WW2, but to the era where the WW2 shooter ruled
Enemy Front is a return to WW2-shooterdom, the old school’s last barricade that will remind you of some of your best Medal of Honor and Call of Duty moments, as well as the reason we don’t see WW2 shooters anymore.
The game’s best elements can be summed up in three words: boom, thwack, crumple. The single-shot kills from your Colt 45 and rifle (no bulletproof vests, yay!) and the way the enemies get hit and sprawl remain immensely satisfying right to the end. You even get to follow the slo-mo bullet if you land a sniper bullet in your enemy’s vitals (head, heart and, probably, scrotum). The developer’s background in sniper games is made clear in good sound design (follow the enemies’ footsteps as you try to keep your own quiet and hear those bullets zip past) and your weapons really have the needed oomph, dropping most enemies in one or two shots - it’s clear that a lot of work has been done to deliver this satisfying effect.
And then there is the rest of the game...AAA titles from the big boys have [censored] guys didn’t have that amount of money. A lot of assets had to be reused - warehouses and houses throughout the game follow the exact same pattern. You will also get stuck if you try to climb certain stairs while crouching, some open doors in France have ghostly windows in them that shatter when fired through, your hand is pushing at air next to a detonator during an animation, and yet the detonator moves downward, and the same couple of civilian models represent the entirety of France and Warsaw’s population. It’s hard to get an emotional response when the “horrors of war” are shown with these bland models all sitting or lying in the same positions over and over, like manikins with red paint on them. The melee animations also suffer - shooting and stealth melee kills are wonderfully done, but then we have the same horrible melee animations we had in the first WW2 shooters with a swinging arm, no thwack and an enemy that soundlessly reacts as if he has been shot. Also, no bullet penetration! That one nearly murdered the game for me - sure you can shoot through enemies, but a centimetre thick plank will stop tank rounds.
And right here is where the bad old days rears its ugly head -this game ends up copying a very tired, old genre instead of re-inventing, or even using modern features we now expect, like Wolfenstein The New Order did. France reminded me of Brothers in Arms, a truly historically accurate game that gripped me more and performed better almost a decade ago, Germany and Norway reminded me of Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, the golden standards of the era that are faintly echoed here, but without those incredible movie-like set piece battles. Warsaw, the centrepiece of the game, is an inferior copy of the Stalingrad siege that you’ve already played over and over. The weight of the tired old sameness, and the same old gameplay drags Enemy Front down into the mud and shoves its head under, and it just doesn’t have the originality to get itself out.
It’s also far too easy to just go on a rampage and kill entire armies - while you drop enemies effortlessly, they have to team up and fire entire clips into you before you get worried. Even on extreme difficulty it takes three to five sniper bullets to kill you. Why try to be silent when you can take on 30+ Nazis with just your .45 and a hallway, and kill a tank with two grenades? The enemies are the very old school standard morons, always taking cover in the exact same places that their friends just died in and conveniently popping up to be shot. Your comrades promise to cover you, but then sit tight to let you, a journalist(!) save the world on your own. The plot and game promises to be “realistic” and open-ended, “breaking out of linearity”, but after a couple of good levels ends up being the same old move from a to b stuff with not enough money or inventiveness to hook me, and despite updated graphics and the Cryengine, feels and at times looks like something from the dark ages. Luckily you always have the boom-thwack-crumple to make you feel better.
Summary
The game supplies wonderfully satisfying shooting and stealth melee kills, but suffers from an outdated similarity to older games, especially in the final parts of the game, that will remind you why the modern shooter is now king. Enemy Front is a valiant effort by a Polish developer that tries to remind you that the Poles suffered horribly in WW2, but tries to do so by using an American space marine journalist James Bond that cannot die and kills at will throughout occupied Europe, and a very outdated approach that will remind you of older games that did it in exactly the same way a decade ago. You have to decide whether that is a good or a bad thing yourself.