Front Wars Review

Originally released on mobile platforms early in 2014, it’s clear that Front Wars developer Homemade Games is a fan of popular Nintendo handheld strategy series Advance Wars. So obvious is it in fact, that the developer has essentially tried to recreate it practically wholesale in Front Wars and in porting the game to PC from mobile, has seemingly barely spared little or no thought for the increased sophistication and higher expectations of its new target platform.

Front Wars homage to Advance Wars is obvious. Sometimes a little too much so

For those unfamiliar with the Advance Wars games developed by Intelligent Systems, the premise is extremely simple. Players are presented with cartoonish looking forces in bite-sized, turn-based battles where victory is achieved as soon as the enemy’s forces have been whittled down to nothing, or, if their headquarters ends up being captured. As strategy games go then, it’s as simple as simple can be.

Despite how straightforward the whole affair is then, it’s a little surprising that the Front Wars tutorial still manages to fluff it all up so spectacularly. After showing you how to move around the map, capture bases and manufacture different units, the tutorial stops short of telling you just how well those units actually perform against one another, let alone how using different terrain types can increase or decrease your defence values in combat.

In the case of former, the failure to communicate this information is especially troublesome since the encounters in Front Wars work on the predication of a rock, paper, scissors style set-up where some units are highly effective against particular types and hardly effective against others. In terms of the latter notion of understanding how the terrain types work, all of this had to be found out through self-discovery, rather than the game actually arming you with that crucial knowledge from the off. So while placing units in forests, buildings or mountainous terrain causing their defence value to increase and making them much hard to kill in combat, might seem obvious to stalwarts of the genre, it’s probably not fair to assume that newcomers hold the same knowledge.

Once into the game proper, Front Wars offers up a pair of single-player campaigns, a range of separate skirmishes, multiplayer and map building and sharing functionality. In the case of the campaigns, they basically take many of the key battles of World War II and squeeze them through an Advance Wars shaped funnel. The problem is however, that they don’t actually do much with the setting outside of providing a whiffy bit of historical background and little else.

Similarly to the handheld title that it draws inspiration from, Front Wars particular brand of strategy is easily accessible and suitable for armchair novices to get stuck into

As a result, these campaign missions end up feeling like disjointed skirmishes, instead of the much more substantial feeling sorties; an issue that seems exacerbated when taken in light of the historical subject matter that Front Wars concerns itself with. In fact, you could literally have any other conflict than World War II in the game and I doubt anybody would really notice or care, such is short the thrift that it has been given.

Away from the paper-thin campaign context and the horrendously inelegant tutorial, Front Wars actually gives a reasonable account of itself in its lean turn-based battles. Each unit, whether that’s riflemen, rocket troops, jeeps, tanks, aircraft and everything in between, can move a certain number of spaces before their turn is up, while each of them also performs better or worse when pitted against certain types of other units as well. Rocket troops, for example, perform extremely well against lightly armoured vehicles, while standard riflemen can usually make mincemeat out of the former pretty quickly.

Wearing its mobile design on its sleeves, Front Wars’ missions are for the most part, brief yet accessible affairs that can be tackled in swift fashion. As it turns out, Homemade Games has actually done a good job with the difficulty curve, fostering a steady climb of gradually more challenging missions across the duration of the game’s single-player campaigns. Luckily, for those who find the sorties too easy or too difficult, three different difficulty settings exist to tailor the level of challenge appropriately, respectively awarding one to three stars in a fashion that will be extremely familiar to players of mobile fare. Elsewhere an instant restart is only a click away and thus enables players to jump right back into the fray with little delay.

With its mobile DNA so deeply entrenched in its gameplay and ease of accessibility, it comes as little surprise that Front Wars mobile origins are also glimpsed in the game’s presentation as well. With cartoony, yet clean looking visuals bolstered by big menus and a simplistic interface, Front Wars looks exactly how you would expect a mobile title to look on PC some nearly two years on, albeit without any real work done to it.

There is a wide variety of unit types to choose from but the tutorial fails to provide insight into their advantages and disadvantages versus one another

And that’s the thing really. For as much as Front Wars began life less as a love letter to Advance Wars but rather as an obsessed stalker that required mental help, its mobile audience appreciated it for what it was and accepted that the lo-fi presentation was simply part of the package. For PC owners though, there just simply hasn’t been enough done to the game to make it significantly superior to the 2014 mobile game in ways that it definitely should be given the vast selection of similar offerings that PC folks have. PC owners simply deserve better. Again.

In aping Advance Wars so thoroughly, Front Wars lacks its own identity. From the split-screen battle scenes to the simplistic, deliberately minimalist unit design and map view, it’s clear that the game undoubtedly owes the entirety of its existence to Advance Wars. If Advance Wars never existed then neither would Front Wars. It’s as plain and simple as that.