Battlefront

Total score
Game play
Nuts & bolts
Bells & whistles	N/A

 

Battlefront is a curious beast.  It's solid.  It's written by an accomplished group of guys.  It doesn't do anything horribly wrong. But it just didn't get to me.

As someone who regularly plays games I bought ten years ago this game is an oddity.  I got it early this year and I'm no longer playing it.  In fact I already haven't played it in months.

Three stars but only just, because ...

Game play

Battlefront essentially has two fairly large problems with it.  The first of which can be summed up in just one word: replayablity.  It hasn't got any.  The game comes with only four scenarios, and they're all pretty slight affairs. Once you're done with those you're left to your own devices.

There is an editor, but it's the usual horrible SSG affair.  The (at last count) grand total of just one user scenario that there is to download attests to the editor's usefulness some six months after the game was released.

Any description of game play has to teeter closer to shop-worn than to solid, so in giving it one star I'm again being perhaps more generous than I should be.  Nobody who's played any of SSG's Decisive Battles games, from The Ardennes Offensive on through to Battles in Italy, will be surprised by the game play here.  Referring you to your memory of those games is a better way of describing this game than any other method I know.  The scale has changed (battalions instead of regiments) but the play is much the same.  Much the same in a good way -- there are still no messy phases, everything's pretty intuitive, and there's as much depth as you want to drill down into -- but much the same none the less.

And that's the second big problem with Battlefront, and perhaps a symptom of SSG's previous success more than anything: though this is meant to be the start of a whole new series of games, there's nothing all that new or innovative here.  Battlefront feels like the end of journey rather than the beginning of one. 

Maybe it's the hexes and CRTs that feel tired, maybe it's its similarity to the earlier games.  I'm not certain.  I just didn't feel like I was getting much more than a scenario pack for my money here, and a small scenario pack at that. 

Nuts & bolts

The editor aside the rest of the game works fine out of the virtual box.  There were a bevy of minor bugs that the game shipped with (missing text & the like) but those bugs were for the most part fixed by the game's first patch.

So I'm giving this game three stars, but only really for people who either haven't bought a Decisive Battles game in a while, or who own all of them all and who are looking for something exactly the same.  If you're after something new on the other hand, this is not the game for you.  If you're after something new please consider it to have got just the two stars instead.

I'm curious to see where SSG goes next.  Maybe they'll vastly expand the Battlefront line, or maybe this game will end up as one of those sterile hybrids that litter the evolutionary plain.  A decent enough performer, but with nowhere left to go.  I wouldn't be very surprised either way.