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

If you are not familiar with him, Black is a very well-known and respected game designer, having cut his teeth at Argonaut Software as the cutscene artist on the game Alien Odyssey (1995), after which he went over to Bullfrog where he was the lead artist on Populous: The Beginning (1998). Black is probably best known for his work as senior designer at Criterion Games where he worked on Burnout 3: Takedown (2004), and the extremely popular military shooter Black (2006), following that with Viking: Battle for Asgard (2008) for The Creative Assembly, and the arcade shooter Bodycount (2011) for Codemasters.

His move to City Interactive was a low-key affair with very little publicity, so we had no idea what the project was -- until now -- and based upon what we saw in the demo for Enemy Front, this is a project to which he has applied his own unique vision in spades! After that observation was completely voiced it naturally provoked another question: why was that such a surprise?

Black is widely considered to be a dinkum hardcore gamer hailing from the 'old-school' gamer community in which membership is typically judged less by the duration of presence and more by criteria that includes the quality of a fusion of joie de vivre and carpe diem in equal measures with skill and an intuitive grasp for each game; when this collection of skills and place happens to be found in the form of a senior member of a game's dev team, that collection of skills, capability, and insight presents an undefinable je ne sais quoi that most gamers shrug off the attempt to describe but know instantly when it is encountered.

The benefit to be found in placing such a person in an authoritative position on any game project would seem to be so obviously a good thing that one might think that every studio would seek out a Stuart Black of its own, and yet it happens so rarely that when it does occur we cannot help but emphasize it when writing about that title...

With a long familiarity of Black as a game developer and artist the evidence that was present in the demo clearly revealed that he has imprinted his own unique style upon the project, and despite the lack of public chat with respect to his philosophy for destructive world environments and a preference for ultra-realism for the mechanics and physics in game worlds, the word is that in addition to helping to shape the story and the game world, Black was instrumental in setting the bar for realism very high with respect to the weapons and their implementation in the game, and the destructive elements within that world that we have come to expect from a Stuart Black game.

From what we were able to see in play during the briefing and demo for the game, which we should note was an early Alpha Build presented on the Xbox 360 platform (the game will be releasing on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Windows PC), there is little room for disappointment and good cause for excitement -- but we will get to that in a bit.

One of the more interesting trends that appears to dominate video games -- whether FPS or other genres when World War II is the primary environment -- is the remarkable tendency towards a very narrow interpretation for the part of the war around which games and their stories focus.

Hundreds of years from now if cultural anthropologists and historians have only video games to go by as the official record for World War II the war will be cleanly divided between Asia and Europe, and the events in those two theaters will also be very clearly defined...

In Asia the war begins with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the battle for Midway, followed almost instantly by the mission to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with everything else save for the skirmishes that took place in the Philippines and to a lesser extent a few modest naval battles off of the north coast of Australia appearing as inconsequential footnotes.

The war in Europe -- according to video games -- took place at Normandy, save for the largely unsuccessful events of Operation Market Garden, and a string of major battles like the Battle of the Bulge and the Battle for Berlin all pretty much taking place at the same time, with fifteen minutes set aside for a minor air battle over a dinky little island called Great Britain, and a few naval engagements involving battleships that may or may not have been necessary depending upon which game series you happen to be playing...

Careful study of the tactics for the war will reveal that a number of mission types were very common, usually involving a small unit of heroic and dedicated soldiers who have been ordered to locate and rescue a single soldier for any number of reasons (The Saving Private Ryan School of WWII), or a group of likeable but stereotypical soldiers who have each others back while executing orders that may or may not make sense, may or may not involve taking a hill/town/church/strategic viewpoint, and will likely result in lots of dead enemies but very few fatalities in your unit (The Band of Brothers School of WWII).

In addition to these two major campaign missions a number of minor missions were present during the war that entails sniper-on-sniper battles, convoys of trucks moving inexplicably from point-a to point-b and which require you to defend them, or conveniently docked large battleships which your men will fight in or around and that will reveal hidden (A) uber weapons, (B) treasure, (C) escaping Nazi officers and/or political figures, or (D) all of the above. If none of these are present your mission will involve a parachute.

Fortunately the Germans were very good about leaving stashes of magical first aid kits that instantly restore life, along with stacks of ammunition conveniently located in spots behind fallen logs, on crates, or otherwise situated for you to find just when it will help you the most, and in addition to that, these ammunition stashes will invariably contain the type of bullets you need for your Thompson SMG and special US-made sniper rifle/shotgun/pistol/anti-tank weapon.