Front Lines is a futuristic hex-type board game from Impressions that seems to be trying hard to break new ground. Unfortunately, what it actually does is rehash every other game of its type without doing anything new or inventive.
The opening animation is not bad at all, showing a couple of tanks in a battle with hovercrafts. It does get a little long, however, but it can be stopped easily enough with the press of a key. From there you're on to the game.
There are 33 scenarios which you can choose from initially. They range in difficulty from easy to difficult and in size from small battles to all-out slugfests. Front Lines plays just like you'd expect any hexagonal map game to play. Each unit has its own movement, firepower and defensive capabilities. The play is divided up into two phases, movement and combat, and it doesn't ever get much more complicated than that.
What's especially surprising is that the game isn't better than it is. It is difficult to tell where you can move because the computer offers no visual cues showing where you can move to. This fact is especially bewildering when, during the combat phase, the hexes that are beyond your firing range are shaded red. So why shade the combat boundaries and not movement? Who knows. But that ain't all.
The combat phase is similarly lacking. Front Lines does account for "line-of-sight," so some targets which are otherwise in range will be invalid because you can't see them (because they are behind a hill, too high up etc.). This isn't a new concept in hex games at all, but the targeting screen simply shows the target being in range. Only if you attempt to fire at it does the computer tell you that it is not in your line-of -sight. This is particularly frustrating if you have lots of potential targets but still have to click on each to determine which are out of your line of sight.
Front Lines' best feature is its graphics. The units look good on the board rolling around and firing. But the animation used to move the pieces from this hex to that hex does get a little time consuming so there is an option to turn off the animation. But this, again, is misleading.
When animation is on, the tanks, hovercrafts, etc. will roll or hover through the line of hexes to get to the destination hex. You'll eventually get tired of watching and waiting for that to happen so when you turn off the animation, instead of rolling or hovering through the hexes, you'd expect the unit to just go from the starting hex to the destination hex, no wait. But when the animation is turned off, the tank or whatever will actually pop into each hex on it's way to the destination hex at about the same speed that it took the animation to happen. Why was it done like this? Who knows, but it sure was irritating.
Front Lines comes with an editor that is a nice part of the package. It allows you to make your own maps or edit any of the existing ones however you want. It allows you to change virtually any aspect of the game, from where you place terrain to combat ratios and such.
All in all, Front Lines is a game that would like to really be worthy of belonging on a CD-ROM, but outside of the nicely done opening animation and speech that comes along with the game, there's really not much here. Even the music isn't that great. One of the first things you'll learn to do is find the music-off function on the option bar. With all of the great strategy games out there, I'm really surprised that Impressions went with such old ideas and low performance.
