May 23, 2007 - As yet another World War II game shows up on the store shelves, one really starts to look for aspects that will raise a title far above the competition. 10tacle studios and Digital Reality bring us War Front: Turning Point, an otherwise average real-time strategy game that relies on its main premise and storyline to form its shaky pedestal. The premise is simple: "What if... World War II happened this way?" According to the writers, the assassination of the German Leader early in the war could have lead to a very different turn of events, which includes unlikely alliances and unforeseen enemies. War Front's packaging is a bit misleading, with its futuristic depictions of Mech Warriors, flying infantry and giant Zeppelins, in that the setting is still in the past. Though all these units feature in the game, the story is actually probably set somewhere in the mid-fifties and the new feats of engineering presumably stem from heightened war-time efforts combined with a hefty dose of conspiracies. Whatever the reasoning, that's the alternate reality providing the setting for War Front. The real question is whether that's enough to warrant yet another WWII game in an already crowded market.

War Front's single-player campaign is fairly interesting and allows the player to go through the story from two perspectives, the Allies and the Germans. In any other game, these would be opposites, but early on in the campaigns, the parties form an alliance against the even greater threat of communism. Both sides of the story begin with the invasion of London, reach a variety of locations across Europe and Scandinavia, and culminate at the core of the Soviet empire. The missions are composed of primary and secondary objectives, and usually feature one bonus (and sometimes hidden) objective. Most are of the form "destroy building X" or "bring important character Y to location Z," but a combination of excellent storyboard crafting and map design instill more than enough diversity in these otherwise repetitive tasks to generate interest in completing the game. In addition, some objectives require a few attempts and sound tactics for success, so it's not always just a matter of blasting your way through. Unfortunately, portions of the tech tree are released with such granularity that the gameplay evolves painfully slowly from one level to the next. The main shortcoming of the campaign is that the player always starts next to a resource point that contains much more resources than is necessary to complete the level, and so by tasking two collector units to it early on in the level, resources are no longer a concern.

In sharp contrast, resources are vital in the multiplayer and skirmish modes since the resource points contain very little. The reasonably smart AI will therefore act fairly aggressively to capture them before you do, and often succeeds. In fact, computer players are somewhat too aggressive because opposing players usually annihilate each other within 20 minutes of play, leading to very short skirmish games where turtling is an inefficient strategy and may deter players who favour it. Multiplayer games are pretty constrained in configurability, with common options such as random maps and limitless resource points unavailable. In addition, the game does not feature a map editor either, and suggestions that one might eventually be released have yet to come to fruition. Players are thus limited to the roughly 30 maps packaged with the game, most of which are strongly inclined towards two-team games. One of the five possible victory conditions, an assignment of secret objectives to be completed for each player, seemed promising but with a limited amount of players in their GameSpy server rooms, that feature proved difficult to test. This comes as no surprise after looking for War Front's virtually inexistent web user community where the little of which could be found was predominantly in German.