Enemy Front's Open World War

It’s been a while since we last heard from World War II shooter Enemy Front. For those keeping score at home, the first time GameSpot reported on this game was way back in 2012. We saw it again during that year’s E3, and then Enemy Front promptly dropped off our radar until it resurfaced this past March with a new teaser trailer. Why the two-year gap? According to Stephen Skelton, producer at developer City Interactive, the team wanted to de-modernize this first-person shooter.

Previously, Enemy Front followed in the footsteps of recent Modern Warfare and Call of Duty games, with players being ferried along from one explosive battle to the next. However, during those last two years, a lot of first-person shooters have been released in this style. City Interactive didn’t want Enemy Front to feel stale by comparison, so they decided to try something different and aim for a more open-ended style of shooter.

To achieve this new style, City Interactive turned to stealth games such as Dishonored for inspiration. Now, instead of dragging you through one firefight after another, players are given more options as to how they could approach a battle. In the demo I saw, a group of enemy troops were camped out around an abandoned house in the woods. Naturally, our hero needed to deal with them. While going in guns blazing was definitely an option, our hero instead chose to scout the perimeter, silently dispatching any who strayed too far from the group with a silent melee kill. He then spotted a truck perched atop a hill and shot out its tire blocks so that it would careen into the encampment and blow the remaining troops away.

With all this talk of stealth kills and precision shooting, you might think Enemy Front casts you as a grizzled war veteran, but that’s not the case. Instead, you play as Robert Hawkins, a war correspondent. What’s his deal? Hawkins is an extremely hands-on sort of reporter who’s not afraid to get a little dirty if it means getting a good story. The bulk of the game is told via flashbacks as Hawkins recounts to some very suspicious Polish resistance fighters how he got caught up in their fight. This all culminates in Hawkins taking part in the Warsaw Uprising, a military operation designed to liberate the Polish capital from Nazi control.

Hawkins is an extremely hands-on sort of reporter who’s not afraid to get a little dirty if it means getting a good story.

For the team at City Interactive, setting their game during the Warsaw Uprising is a personal choice since they are themselves a Polish development studio. And while most of World War II has been thoroughly catalogued across dozens of first-person shooters and other types of games, the team feels the events surrounding the Warsaw Uprising have not been as well documented--at least in gaming. You can experience all the action for yourself when Enemy Front is released for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 this Summer.