World War II: Frontline Command is a real-time strategy game from a developer that is known more for its style than its substance. Developer Bitmap Brothers previously created Z and its sequel, Steel Soldiers. Z's claim to fame was its zany sense of humor, but it was still a traditional real-time strategy game, and Steel Soldiers was a rather average game too. The company's latest game, World War II: Frontline Command, does have some new ideas, but these concepts--and some of the game's more-standard real-time strategy mechanics--aren't implemented well.

Many of Frontline Command's missions represent minor operations in World War II, but the game also has some big battles.

Frontline Command is another World War II strategy game in which you command squadrons of units that are provided to you at the beginning of each mission, rather than produced from structures you must build. The game's missions require you to complete objectives such as destroying bridges, clearing bunkers, and knocking down radar towers. Strategy games of this sort are supposed to remove resource management from the picture, allowing tactics to take center stage. Frontline Command lets you use 23 different units on the Allied side (the only playable side in the single-player mode), and it features some interesting twists on the standard RTS formula, though some of these innovations don't work as well as they might have.

For instance, one of the innovative mechanics that works well is the game's fog of war. In Frontline Command, the fog of war actually looks and behaves like fog, and things like elevated areas and large objects can block your sight. Furthermore, some units have a wider range of vision than others, and units can be paired up to take advantage of their collective line of sight. However, the fog of war goes hand in hand with the game's treatment of unit sound, which doesn't work quite as well. In Frontline Command, soldiers can detect their enemies by sound as well as by sight. So, for example, crawling infantry are difficult to detect because they are both harder to see and less noisy. Unfortunately, there's no way to effectively gauge how much noise your units are hearing--there's no audio meter or anything like that. If your enemies do make noise, you'll be able to see their health bars even though you can't see the actual units, but it doesn't seem like this mechanic is as fleshed-out as it could have been.

Frontline Command also features an unusual morale system. With high morale, you can perform heroic actions that boost your units' combat effectiveness. High morale can come from trouncing enemies, destroying key objectives, and keeping your troops healthy. Similarly, injured troops are less effective and drag down company morale, so you always need to keep paramedic trucks on hand to heal injured units. In practice, the connection between health and morale means that battles can come to a close very quickly once things stop going your way.

The red circle that indicates a unit's range sometimes works, but sometimes it doesn't.

But you may have a hard time appreciating Frontline's innovative features because of the game's pathfinding and interface problems. For instance, though it's easy to select a small group and direct its movements, selecting a large group of units and ordering them to a destination will often result in one part of the group on the other side of a nearby river, another part on the wrong side of a chain-link fence, and still another part stuck behind a bunker. It's possible to manually select each unit and order it to converge on your destination, but this process is far too cumbersome to be useful. The game also has other, more-minor interface issues, such as the fact that it displays an individual unit's firing range, but doesn't do so for a selected group. Also, the game doesn't let you manually order your troops to attack any hostile enemies they encounter while moving, or to return fire while moving, but your units will sometimes do these things themselves. Furthermore, you can't check your mission objectives once a mission is under way, and some of the objective briefings provide erroneous information, such as in a mission that supposedly requires engineers to destroy a radar tower that can easily be destroyed with infantry grenades.