Enemy Front

My honest first impression of Enemy Front is that CI Games had the right instincts and almost none of the execution budget to back them up. The Warsaw Uprising as a shooter backdrop is legitimately underused territory, and the game deserves credit for building a story around it. Robert Hawkins is an American war correspondent swept up with Resistance fighters across France, Germany, Norway, and occupied Poland, and the flashback-heavy narrative structure at least tries to be more than a corridor march through D-Day. The setting alone is the clearest reason anyone would pick this up. On paper, the approach sounds flexible: gun down enemies head-on, snipe from a distance with a slow-motion bullet-cam borrowed from CI Games' own Sniper: Ghost Warrior series, or creep through levels using stealth takedowns. In practice, that last option is where things fall apart hardest. Stealth kills are drawn-out animations that leave you exposed for several seconds, and the enemy AI is inconsistent enough that you can walk a patrol into a bottleneck and pick them off one by one. The sniping is legitimately the game's best gear, with satisfying bullet-cam feedback and enough open sight lines to make it feel purposeful. If you treat Enemy Front as a budget sniping game with some corridor shooting on the side, you will extract the most fun from it. The CryEngine foundation gives the game presentable outdoor environments, particularly the Polish countryside and bombed-out Warsaw streets, though texture quality is uneven and the cutscene video quality drew near-universal criticism at launch. Checkpoint spacing is a recurring frustration: poorly placed saves mean a death can send you back across a large stretch of cleared ground with no incentive to fight the same enemies a second time. There is also a multiplayer component with Team Deathmatch, Deathmatch, and a radio-capture mode, but the servers are effectively dead and have been for years. Treat the package as single-player only. The honest summary is this: Enemy Front is a commercial misfire that CI Games themselves acknowledged, and it shows. The "play your way" promise is not fully delivered. The AI does not react convincingly, the story is weakly told despite an ambitious protagonist hook, and the overall polish sits somewhere around mid-tier 2010. But there is a game here, a roughly eight-to-ten-hour campaign with some satisfying sniper moments and a setting that no other major WWII shooter has bothered with. For players who have already exhausted the Call of Duty WWII catalogue and want something different in geography if not in mechanics, it scratches a specific, low-expectation itch at the right price.

Alex · Scout Team

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