Frontlines: Fuel of War (PC)

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Expect over 60 near future inspired vehicles and weapons to play with

Frontlines Fuel of War, Kaos Studio's debut game for the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3, is trying to breathe fresh air into the FPS genre, that much is clear. But will it be enough to sweep away the FPS fatigue that some say is brewing a cloud over the genre? VideoGamer.com sat down with art director Luis Cataldi, as well as the game itself, to find out.

First off, let's talk about what Frontlines does that feels fresh. The game's backstory feels pretty cool. Set in 2024, Kaos has gazed into the Michael Moore crystal ball and predicted that waning oil reserves will lead to the next great world conflict. Russia and China get pally and form the Red Star Alliance, and the States and Europe shake hands and form the Western Coalition. We've seen tonnes of games that pit the West against the East in war-torn future, but Kaos has put an impressive amount of thought into working out what might lead to that conflict and what effect it might have on your average Joe.

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As you might imagine, a world without oil is a pretty depressing one indeed. And Frontlines is at pains to depict that through its art direction. "I did a lot of research myself and the art team did a tremendous amount of research," explains Luis Cataldi, art director on the project. "We explored film, we explored graphic novels, we explored television and we explored other games to really see what it is that we wanted to bring visually to this game. We chose a style that is a little grittier, which is very much true for the world of Frontlines."

So what you see in the game's opening cinematic, a series of graphic novel style dynamic stills, is Frontlines' world told through the narration of an embedded war journalist. "The world of Frontlines is an economically depressed future, where the resources have run out, and the world goes into a global depression" says Cataldi.

"Now it's much harder to heat your home and you can't go to the grocery store any more and buy groceries unless you're very wealthy. So I wanted to make sure that we created a world where a lot of the things that you and I take for granted now are discarded. For instance, when you can no longer afford to turn on power in your house what good is a refrigerator, what good is your oven, what good is your car? Those things end up becoming discarded. In an environment where the system breaks down, nobody's going to come and pick it up and haul it to the bin any more. Now all that stuff gets left in your front yard. What you see is a world that's full of neglect."

The remote-controlled drones provide one of Frontlines' highlights

All this back story is all well and good, and is a nice platform from which the dev team can provide something different in the form of soldier chatter in cutscenes, but from what we've seen it doesn't have much of a bearing on what you'll be doing when you actually get on the ground and start pumping rounds into the enemy. Everything has that Middle East desert war torn look we've seen so much of this year in FPS games.

But we're told that you'll come across maps where you'll be able to see what kind of effect this global neglect has had on urban areas. "You'll be in cities where they've been destroyed and there's rubble everywhere and that's the way it's going to stay because no department is coming to clean up this world" says Cataldi. "The system has really started to break down and people are doing what they need to in order to survive."

Which is something we're quite looking forward to - the opportunity to get embroiled in shoot-outs while jumping over someone's useless Humvee because there's no oil to power it.

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