Last year, Kaos studios released a single player demo of Frontlines: Fuel of War, which was met with some disappointment, as the majority of gamers’ interest is associated with the in depth multiplayer mode. Well, now is your chance to get a taste of some large scale combat, as a multiplayer demo has finally been released. After spending some considerable time with the demo, we can say that the game definitely has a solid class system and game play mode, but there are some major issues we hope will be rectified before the final release.

The demo consists of two maps, Oil Field and Street. Street, as it sounds, is an urban setting that appears to have had one too many wars fought within its alleyways and intersections. The map was quite intricate with branching paths and an underground tunnel system. Oil Field on the other hand is a wide landscape with some oil refineries scattered around the map, and it also happens to support vehicles, including tanks, helicopters, and jeeps. In the game, you play as two opposing forces, the Red Star Alliance and Western Coalition. If you’re not familiar with the storyline of the game, basically, the Earth’s oil supplies have dwindled, forcing the most powerful nations to form two opposing alliances in order to battle for control of the world’s most precious resource.

The way the game works is that each team must take over control points to advance the front line; once these are taken over, the team can move onto the next set. Kaos has promised more objectives than simply sitting on control points, such as disabling anti aircraft guns, and destroying ammo caches. Unfortunately, none of these objectives were to be found on either map in the demo, so for now the game feels quite familiar in terms of other large scale shooters. One thing Frontlines does do differently is the class system, where you do choose between the regular choices, such as sniper or assault, but then allows you to pick a role. These range from ground support, drone tech, and air support, giving you certain abilities such as controlling robotic recon drones, or setting up turrets, which can be upgraded as you get kills and complete objectives.

So how does it really play? Like all large scale shooters, if you don’t have a lot of people (32 player max) things can get pretty boring pretty quickly. It’s not much of a battle with only six people. We’re not sure what happened with the 40 player goal Kaos was reaching for, but we do know that the PC version allows for up to 62 players. When we did finally get into a bigger match, things started moving, and control points were being contested. At the moment, the game’s controls aren’t all that bad; however, the aiming system feels somewhat flimsy and looking down your scope is almost too sensitive. Adding to this was the on and off hit detection, which at times felt like we were emptying clips into thin air. We were however able to control the vehicles without much difficulty, and if you’ve played FPS games with vehicles before, it won’t take long till you’re tearing across the map.

Frontlines runs pretty smoothly, until you actually get up close with a few people and then things can really start getting choppy. Now this is not the final game, so we can always hope for these minor issues to be addressed. One thing we did like was the amount of destruction you can cause on a map, which we discovered in an encounter with a tank that continued to decimate every bit of cover we tried to get behind. The environments themselves were absolutely massive, and quite intricate. While the game may not look bad, Frontlines’ graphics are a little behind some of the other games we have seen released on the 360 as of late.

As of now, Frontlines presents a mechanic that does work, and aside from Battlefield 2: Modern Combat and Call of Duty 3, there isn’t really any other large scale shooter available. While the game aims to mix things up with its frontline mechanic, it remains to be seen if this will be enough to set it apart from other games of the same genre. If there were a variety of objectives involved in taking these points, and it has been said there will be, then Frontlines could make itself stand out from similar shooters. We’ll have to play the full version of the game will all the features and hopefully cleaned up online play to make a full judgment. One thing is for sure, Frontlines has some serious competition in the online shooter market for the 360, and will have to do everything it can to get gamers to enlist with it instead of another title.