An In-Depth Look at City Interactive's Enemy Front @ E3 2012

As the doors to E3 open each year it is to a dense and excited crowd of badge-wearing attendees who have queued up into what amounts to a crowd not unlike those commonly witnesses at concert venues near the access doors to the general admission seating. When the clock finally ticks to noon security unlocks the inner gates to the exhibit halls and the crowd surges forward as if controlled by a single mind, with a single goal: get to the exhibits.

Bearing in mind that for 95% of these attendees access to each individual exhibit and game means queuing in lines that can (and sometimes do) take hours to get through. It is certainly easy to understand the motivation behind this collective crowd-urgency and desire to get through the gates and reach the booth of their desire as quickly as possible; success can mean getting to see five games today instead of just four, and regardless of why they are attending the bearers of yellow-coded badges still desire access to the game demo's.

If you happened to be standing on one of the overhead walkways or on the second level of the concourse and halls above looking down -- as we were -- upon that scene, what you saw was bodies packed into the entrance hall and concourse area, on the multiple sets of wide stairs leading up to the exhibit halls, and around the edges of the entrance gates in both directions -- pretty much anywhere that security had not blocked off -- and disappearing through the outer doors, where the beginning of the lines can be found.

As the clock struck noon below us the crowd surged forward, while nearby the door to the private meeting rooms leased by video game developer and publisher City Interactive opened, with one of the wizards from that studio offering us their hand in greeting, and then ushered us inside, where an assistant offered libations and other refreshments as they told us: "We believe that there are still some good stories to tell from World War II."

The exhibits at E3 are traditionally divided into exclusive areas -- there is what we call the "public" side, which encompasses the largest single area of the show, the South Hall, and the smaller but no less important West Hall, and between the two halls on the ground-floor level is the Concourse Level, a long and twisting space that connects the two halls as well as serves as the organizational path off of which can be found the food service courts, the business services office with its shipping center, and a number of smaller exhibits. Then there is the "Private" spaces, which in this case largely encompass the second floor of the Concourse Level, and consists of private meeting rooms, as well as the permanent meeting rooms where many of the publishers and studios with space in the halls also maintained meeting space where other games that were not part of the public show were put on display.

In the case of a publisher like City Interactive, this private briefing and meeting space was where they came to do business, and specifically share the details for their games, offer the official presentations, and otherwise interface with the press in an area that they can control and that shines as a beacon of peace and quiet at an event where both of those highly desired commodities are in short supply.

These details are important for you to be aware of because the information that we are about to share with you, and our impressions of the game that we are about to explore, are as much a product of that environment as they are restricted information. Put simply, 95% of the people attending the expo did not have access to these presentations, briefings, and information. You do.

"We believe that there are still some good stories to tell from World War II."

That observation from our host was the first surprise, but good to know because hey, so do we! While it may have been the first appointment of the day, on day one of the expo, they were all business and before we knew it we were offered a bottle of spring water and then whisked into the small theater where, after all of the dozen odd seats were filled, the lights dimmed and we had our first introduction to the upcoming historical World War II epic shooter Enemy Front, a game whose design included significant elements from Stuart Black, whose imprint was easily noticed all over the demo we saw.