I found Frontlines to be well designed, smooth, and quite enjoyable even for a single player.
shooting games.
Graphics were detailed and sound was good. Movements were reliable and easy, but I did get stuck once and had to “redeploy”. You can’t save your game and it doesn’t overtly tell you when the game has been saved automatically, but objectives come in groups of three or four, and you usually need to accomplish them all before it saves your progress. You can respawn (referred to as “redeploy”) a specific number of times before you have to start over on a group of objectives. The number of respawns varies according to the difficulty of the current objectives. While I usually hate not being able to save, I didn’t find it to be a serious detractor from this game.

The variety of weapons was not as great as some games, but some of the weapons were very innovative. There is a pistol, assault rifle, grenade launcher, sniper rifle and a rocket launcher. You can’t pick up enemy weapons, but there are ammunition dumps at reasonable intervals. I didn’t run out of ammo very often. Besides the usual weapons there are flying drones, robotic ground based crawlers, demolition charges, and anti-personnel turrets that you can deploy. And, you can carry it all at once. haha! I love that.

There are a few types of ground based vehicles which are pretty typical. The tank is fun and there is something like a Bradley which is also pretty cool.

Then there’s the helicopter. I tried it twice and gave up. I’ve never had that much hand-eye coordination. Maybe someone raised on computer games would have no trouble.

I have a 3GHz dual core CPU and two 8800GTS 512 graphics cards. Even with that power, it seemed a bit sluggish at first when I was trying to aim accurately in a hurry. In the web forums people were saying to turn off the “Foliage” which seemed to improve things. Then I turned it back up again, things were still pretty good for some reason. In any case, I had all the other graphics settings turned to max except motion blur which I just didn’t like.

Anyway, comparing this with the single player action of UT3 and Quake Wars (which also target the multiplayer market), I’d definitely give Frontlines a thumbs up. UT3 and QW came across (to me, anyway) as obvious arena style fighting games whereas Frontlines compares well with the Call of Duty and Medal of Honor games.

Overall, I thought this was an entertaining shooter without a lot of complexity or a long learning curve. You won’t have to repeatedly refer to the manual to figure out how stuff works. It’s open field, but with specific objectives, so it leads you along without a lot of need for thought (which is exactly what I like).