After Blacksite delivering messages about the war in Iraq or whatever (I’ve only played the demos, and didn’t pay that much attention to the reviews), now Frontlines shows its cards right from its title, exploring the consequences of the industrialized world’s dependency on oil.

True that the FPS is a well-known, well-mastered genre now, and you need to bring something different to the table; the main originality of Frontlines, besides the gameplay making you “capture” zone like in an online shooter (which isn’t too bad an idea), is the inclusion of drones, mini-tanks or mini-choppers that you control to accomplish some objectives. What could go wrong with remote-controlled gadgets?

Well, that was assuming that the FPS genre is well-mastered in the first place. Which, obviously, it isn’t: while the guns’ feel seems rather realistic (by which I mean you play as a pussy with no arms, who can’t lodge more than two bullets in a target with a machine gun), the controls are very unpleasant (you have to click the right stick to switch to the scope, and click again to toggle it off, which takes a couple of seconds each time — for a game that’ll come out in 2008, that’s just not possible) and become downright unusable when you’re controlling vehicles: I hated driving the tank, and I still can’t figure out how the wheeled drone is actually supposed to work. Which is a little of a bummer, considering that’s the whole point of the game.

But they don’t really intend to sell this anyway, do they? Especially if they’re releasing the demo two months before the game, while everyone’s playing Call of Duty 4.