Would have been great if it wasn't broken out of box!
Frontlines is more-or-less what you'd get if you combined some elements of Call of Duty 4 and Battlefield 2142. It's your typical, the-world-is-coming-to-an-end-fight-over-some-resource FPS. The game was developed by the same guys that did the Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942 and honestly, they should just stick to making mods and not attempt to make their own games.
On to the few good points of this title.
PRO #1. The maps all provide a great atmosphere to duke it out in. There are plenty of places to hide and plenty of cover to use, Not to mention that some of this cover is destroyable, it's nice to see the map turn into a regular warzone over the course of the game.
PRO #2. The game actually has true widescreen support in 16:10 and 16:9 modes, so being able to actually play in 1680x1050 in 16:10 was truely great!
PRO #3. The resonant explosions based on how close you are to them is wounderful if you have a 5.1 system or headphones and ranges from a distant rumble to ear-splitting explosions when it's right around you!
PRO #4. Support for up to 48 players keeps the action intense, and the fact that as the frontlines change over the course of a game, there are usually several different points to spawn.
That's about it unfortunately, now it's time to get down to business because the CONS far outweight the PROS.
CON #1. The game is broken right out of the box, many people can't even get it to run at all, others have sound-loop errors, snail-speed installs and are unable to connect to a single online game. Others have to completely disable their soundcards and all background tasks just to get it past the opening splash screen.
CON #2. There is no VOIP (ingame voice chat). In this day and age this should be standard for any online FPS. Why the devs left this out is plain lazy. There have been user videos on YouTube claiming to have in-game chat but there is no key binding ANYWHERE in the game for it, thus these are false. You'll have to use Teamspeak or Ventrilio if you want to talk to anyone.
CON #3. The squads are limited to 4 people and the squad leader can give orders, but again, with no VOIP the squads are practically pointless to have.
CON #4. While the sound effects in general are pretty good, there is no option that allows you to select a higher (or lower) sound quality, no options to select your speaker set-up not even EAX support of any kind! Again, very lazy to not include these since the vast majority of gamers will have a decient audio card.
CON #5. No Joystick support and you cannont invert your controls for certain vehicles. How can you leave this out in this day and age?
CON #6 Random and severe frame-rate drops while in vehicle turretts. The game runs butter smooth on my system with everything maxed out, but the second i get in the .50cal turret on the truck, WHAMMO It jumps more then a hyper 15y/o on eight Red Bulls and a trampoline. Poorly optimised game code isn't an excuse.
CON #7. The Hit-detection seems to be really inconsistent, sometimes you can pop people that just have their toes sticking out and it will actually hit them, other times you have a clean headshot through a window with them laying prone and it won't even register.
Overall, aside from having to install it twice (the first time it went from installing at a decient speed, then after i put the second disk in , 2 hours later it had only copied 2 files. I had to reboot and turn off all my background programs then it installed without any problems) I haven't had any other issues other then not being to enable the explosion distortion effects. But the lack of EAX support, VOIP and all the bugs that people have been dealing with just goes to show that the devs didn't really pay any attention to the feedback during the open Beta test nor are they "with it" in what people expect a game to have in this day and age.
With Battlefield 2142 being dirt-cheap it's kinda hard to recommend FFOW as a "definately get" title. FFOW is just a disaster to get working, but if you CAN get it working, it's actually quite fun to play. However, it comes off as a rush-job to drag some attention away from the Battlefield series.
With some patches, there may be some hope for this title, but it's largely a case of wrong place, wrong time, especially when stacked up against Call of Duty 4 and Crysis and Bioshock from last year, and the upcomming Far Cry 2 and Rainbow Six Vegas 2 among others.