2024: The Official Video Game - Frontlines: Fuel Of War

[@Movel0]

Clearly what doomed this game was not abiding by the rule that says shotguns are effective only at flyswatter range.

[@westlayne]

@@Movel0 In most games shotguns are a ranged melee weapon

[@BTechUnited]

See also, homefront, although that also had the audacity to have it be a dlc weapon too.

[@giguyjoe]

@@BTechUnited Or Godfather 2

[@LtColwtf]

What doomed this game was not being able to install it because the install didn’t work properly.

[@Reiyuko]

Despite the release cadence of fantastic games in 2008, my child self always played Fuel of War when my friends were not around. The game was unknown when I played it back then. Thank you for this video reminder, it was a concise and agreeable breakdown. I loved drones, they reminded me of what I wanted in Vice City RC vehicles. I look forward to the next video.

[@joaoluishenzdossantos91]

This game really needed some coop for the campaign. It's crazy fun and I don't imagine being that hard to implement.

[@westlayne]

@@joaoluishenzdossantos91 Halo style 4 player co-op would have been awesome.

[@planescaped]

Avian flu pandemic, Russia and China allying, crashing economies, everything sucks. Man, this game predicted 2024 better than any of Deus Ex's predictions, lol.

[@Reinboa]

Would agree if the Russia/China alliance didn’t already exist way before this game released, the economy crashing and everything just being ass already. The pandemic seemed to be the only thing it got. And for Deus Ex, at least the original, has predicted way more then this, MGS 2 and every game past it, and others. The game basically predicted the past 2 decades a year before 9/11 happened. You can’t beat that.

[@Mikkku]

i would also add that ukraine siding with western coalition which is clearly meant to be nato

[@rathapolr.3666]

Here's a joke for you, one of my classmate when the game was new got a trick that you can headshot most soldiers with smg and it's strong enough to kill them in one tap, you could've been specialist and still got plenty of ammo to deal with soldiers. I plan to test this theory once i get any chance to pick up that old disk again. I wasn't paying attention on difficulty back at 2000's.

[@gregp7379]

I purchased the special edition for this game. It came with a fake green metal ammo tin, which I still use today to collect odd bullets over the years. And yes, an underrated GEM.

[@BTechUnited]

Nice to get a pleasant surprise from the KZbin algorithm. Engaging overview!

[@madcat789]

Jesus Christ, core memory unlocked. This game was... God, so good.

[@aarongerard7277]

Thank you algorithm for putting this on my KZbin homepage. Still have my copy of Frontlines for 360 and pop it into my Xbox One every now and then when I get the mood to play this again.

[@thejonathan130]

There's an "early access" steam review for this game dated 1970, which simply says "Nostalgie"

[@mtgAzim]

I only ever got to play the demos for this back in the day. I had no idea they made Homefront. It's funny because I immediately thought of it when watching this. I did get to play a bit of Homefront MP when it was up. It was pretty good. Especially considering that it was one of my earlier PC games, and I had come from 360 mostly, and had spent so much time on the various Battlefields and CoD's. By comparison Homefront had excellent hit detection. I was so annoyed at the time by the horrid bullet lag in Bad Company 1, and the bizarre hit detection in CoD. There were so many times in WaW where I'd shot someone in the ankle, but get a head shot, or people sniping are multiple feet off target, but still get the hit. Going over to Homefront which had really accurate and fast hit-scan was a breath of fresh air. And TTK was low as well. It did lend itself to griefing though, because there were few limits on calling various support and vehicles if you had the points to do so, and spawn camping always ensured that the most griefy players had an ample supply. Still, glad I got to experience it, for a bit anyway.

[@cropathfinder]

I always found the original concept for the game interesting, originally the protagonist was the journalist but higher ups didn't think this would lead to any story or gameplay opportunities. This was also how the devs originally intended to justify the red star campaign, it was going to be a retelling from interviews of soldiers but with the journalist cut aside from cameos in already made cutscenes that was cut for later DLC which eventually got cancelled. The multiplayer on the PC was not that good, the bad FOV , performance, release graphics ,etc killed it and at this time we still had battlefield 2 (and its mods) and 2142 which were still extremely active at the time.

[@gregww101]

I loved this game as a kid.

[@gsamalot]

I remember I had one of the expansion maps for this game, that was a helicopter insurgent style map. Pretty much the attacking side had to take helicopters into the enemy base that was on the other side of a mountain, making a sorta cool cinematic thing where attackers would fly in and drop off troops while the defend used AA weapons and rockets. Which is cool buuuuuut the issue comes from the fact the attackers only had troop helicopters to get to the other side, and all of the AA weapons and rockets in this game just fucking destroy helicopters so having players just run rockets an AA made it impossible to for the attackers to even land, cause someone thought not putting attack helicopters did not make sense, for the scene they wanted to make in this map, so helicopters had no way to defend themselves outside of door gun turrets but those were kind of ass to use. Hell I remember they would just straight up focus fire when one flew over the hill there was no cover for anyone of them and made it be the most one sided map ever that no one played on it.

[@westlayne]

@@gsamalot Sounds like they had a cool idea & never stopped to think if it would actually work or not.

[@gsamalot]

@@westlayne oh not to mention it was a night time map so you hardly see the enemy troop on the ground with that nasty blue tent to simulate night, in a base that was pretty damn big and had places where they could hide an peak shot ya, an the fact you could only go straight over the hill. I shit you not they restrcited where you could fly so you could not go to the left or right side with out worrying about the game, telling you to return to the battlefield and kill you before you even got close to the base, it was forcing players to go over the massive hill.

[@radfoxuk8113]

I loved this game, but I got it second hand on disk for X360, like 2013? By then, couldn't find a full match. This is like the first Homefront as one of those games with great design and balancing, but just lost players to the mainstream games that were just too popular and generic, I've still never found another game as well balanced as the Homefront multiplayer was.

[@westlayne]

@@radfoxuk8113 People are always shocked when I tell them I enjoyed Homefront multiplayer more than MW3.

[@edspace.]

I installed it on Steam but it wouldn't start when I loaded it. I've bought the disk version so I'll see if it works well on my Retro Computer.

[@Betito1171]

I’ve always wanted this game

[@BittySHADOW]

I can't tell you how much I loved this game. It played better on console, in my opinion. It made me sad that the lobbies were short-lived.

[@HandsomeSquidward-q7g]

I have a weird love-hate relationship with this game. I like the setting, since it's just like you said: Something between BF2142 and Bad Company 2, with lots of geopolitical detail thrown in if you care to read the in-game lore section, which is not far from our IRL situation. The aesthetics were great, since they gave the "20 minutes in the future feel" very well. A lot like the Ghost Recon games, but applied to a much larger scale. Regarding the gunplay, I absolutely despised using the guns themselves. They look and sound amazing, but feel like ass to play with. I would even go so far as to compare the accuracy and weapon spread with original and unmodded versions of the Stalker series' guns (*shudders in horror*). Rocket launchers, drones and the support powers you could call in were amazing and were the things that kept me playing. The vehicles were similar to the guns for me: They looked and sounded great, but played like crap (the tank shells fly slower than an obese pigeon, and flying helicopters were a headache at the best of times.

[@jessiegunther1079]

yeah, its really a shame how such good games get overshadowed by the big companies and such. Me, i was black ops 1, RUSE and Endwar for the time. Having read abut this, bot support could have done it a great favor. The classic star wars battlefront 1 and 2 did that very right for their time. And HOmefront, a short but rather good game i found.. Tried even a fanfic/croosover but...tthat backfired accodently...

[@MichaelNarushevich]

Great review and a curious game, I need to take a closer look at it too. By the way, it would be very interesting for the audience in Eastern Europe if you would make a review of STALKER 2 and maybe compare this game with the low-budget vladik brutal game

[@westlayne]

@@MichaelNarushevich I'm playing Stalker 2 right now, the video's gonna take awhile though. Lot to talk about.

[@Betito1171]

All writers are activists. Current ones are just really bad at hiding it.

[@outlaw-nazca5759]

@12:40 yeeaahhh that almost didnt age well lol

[@westlayne]

@@outlaw-nazca5759 I know wtf

[@Gruntvc]

Man, the AAA FPS gaming market back then was great. Now? Most of these franchises are dead or are pale imitations of what they once were. I'm gonna add Frontlines to my list of FPS games to play. Unlike Homefront, it is backwards compatible on Xbox One X and Xbox Series X. I pretty much gotta go back to the 2000s/6th/7th gen years to play the kind of FPS games I like. Most indie FPS games keep copy pasting Doom/Quake 1990s FPS design.

[@westlayne]

@@Gruntvc All the nostalgia money is in 80's/90's fps right now. It'll be our turn next.

[@Syndfall]

Algorithm done blessed us with this one!!