Genre: First-Person Shooter
Publisher: THQ
Developer: Kaos Studios
Release Date: Fall 2007

Frontlines: Fuel of War is set in the depressingly near future, when oil supplies are on the verge of drying up. You play as a member of a Western Coalition military unit dispatched near the Caspian Sea as part of an operation in Russia, as warring groups battle to consolidate their energy supplies. As your helicopter comes toward the war zone, it takes enemy fire, killing part of your team and causing a crash. Welcome to the brink of World War III.

Frontlines is an urban, military-themed first-person shooter, from the team that brought the world Battlefield 2. With that pedigree, you might think you know what to expect … and you'd be right, and you'd be wrong.

Frontlines is, above all else, big. The backdrop is all rusting oil platforms and decaying cities, with a hundred places to hide and a thousand places from which enemies can fire. Playing it online, either on the PC or the X360, tends towards the epic, with up to 32 players on the 360 or 64 PC gamers exchanging fire.

The general feel is militaristic and quasi-realistic without being bogged down in the fine details. For example, as per recent action-game trending, there are no health bars; if you take too much damage, your vision will cloud and a red fog will appear at the edges of the screen. Should this happen, find someplace to hide until your vision returns to normal, and you'll be able to proceed as per usual.

When you start the game, you can opt to spawn as one of five types of operatives: assault, heavy assault, anti-armor, sniper, and medic. Each character can also choose one of a variety of secondary specializations that weren't all functional in the pre-alpha. The secondary specializations offer up the options of setting up turret guns, attacking enemies with toy helicopters, sending out small robots to do your bidding, and more.

You can also hop into tanks, jeeps, and various types of aircraft, for the various ensuing hijinks. Whatever else you can say about Frontlines, and there's a fair amount, shooting a single infantry soldier with a tank cannon will never get old.

The single-player mode is surprisingly robust, given how much of the game is dedicated to its multiplayer. You're a single soldier in a squad, but you don't command your fellow soldiers. Instead, you're just one cog in the military machine, albeit an important one, as other soldiers won't accomplish major objectives. That leaves it up to you to storm enemy strongholds, tap their computers, enter their bases, kill their dudes, and save the day.

This is made a little easier by the fact that when you die, you respawn, as opposed to starting over at a checkpoint. If you do what I did, and die in the explosion that knocks down the enemy's satellite communications tower, you'll reappear as another soldier with your progress intact. To compensate for this, the game is routinely quite difficult, with no real qualms about putting you in an intractable tactical situation. You may respawn a lot, but you can easily leave yourself stranded and alone without the tools you need to proceed.

Frontlines is still in pre-alpha, but for all that, it works very well on the 360 and PC. The developers are currently in the process of balancing the game, ensuring that no one class has an overwhelmingly powerful or versatile weapon, which should lead directly back to a solid and frenetic multiplayer game. FPS fans should be watching this one, if they aren't already.