Historical shooters, fittingly enough, are relics of the past. The flavor of the month is now futuristic warfare with advanced weaponry, nifty gizmos, and real-world environments the equivalent of chocolate sprinkles, hot fudge, and the ubiquitous cherry on top. Frontlines' setting hits a little close to home -- 2024 -- with financially strapped countries aligning themselves with one of two new factions: the Western Coalition and Red Star Alliance. Their fight is for control of the last remaining oil reserves, so all you SUV driving gas-aholics have about 16 years worth of reckless fun before we all pay the price.

Open Range

Frontlines: Fuel of War seems most heavily influenced by EA's Battlefield series of online, action-oriented war games. The maps here are huge, and the general idea is that players can accomplish objectives however they see fit. Unlike Call of Duty 4, where the action is strategically funneled through linear paths and key chokepoints, Frontlines allows you to go anywhere on a map with surprisingly few restrictions placed in your way. The single-player campaign, however, is extremely short and seems more an excuse to familiarize players with the controls and maps than to immerse them in a story.

The campaign begins in Turkmenistan, where the immediate goal has you securing an oil field. Subsequent objectives generally involve reaching specific points somewhere on the map and holding down a button to "take control" over a tower, computer room, and so forth. Since there are often multiple objectives at once, players can choose which to accomplish first.  There doesn't seem to be any strategic benefit for journeying to one destination over another. You still face the same number of enemies, for example, regardless of which objective you decide to tackle. Since all objectives are clearly labeled on your heads-up display, you are basically just pointing yourself in the right direction and performing the old Crazy Taxi technique of "follow the arrow."

Appetite for Destruction    

Frontlines' single-player campaign spans a paltry seven missions, with each mission taking roughly fifty minutes of your time. While Call of Duty 4's solo campaign was similarly short; the intense firefights, cinematic heroics, and talkative characters made it far more memorable. If Frontlines' campaign merely offers a taste of the action, its multiplayer game is the full meal. Everything is opened up, allowing players to take command of armored vehicles, helicopters, and some of the coolest gadgets in the game: remote-controlled drones armed with weapons. The drawback is there's only one mode: frontlines. Players are assigned to a faction and begin a tug-of-war match for certain control points. The goal is to move a "frontline" closer to the enemy's base by capturing nearby checkpoints or objectives.

New soldiers are outfitted with one of six predefined weapon loadouts: assault, heavy assault, sniper, anti-vehicle, special operations, and close combat. Each loadout offers three weapons: a rifle, a pistol, and explosives. Also available to new recruits are one of four roles to specialize in: ground support, EMP tech, drone tech, and air support. Ground support specialists, for example, can manually repair damaged vehicles on the battlefield or automatically repair them once inside the vehicle. Air support specialists can pinpoint a target and then call in an aerial strike to take the target out with extreme prejudice. The interesting part of roles is that players can increase their experience in a role over time.

Earning Your Stripes

Gaining experience on the battlefield involves killing rivals, capturing checkpoints, and using role-specific equipment. Once enough experience has been awarded, players will increase their starting role's rank from one to two and then three. Each new rank adds new equipment to deploy, such as portable sentry guns or an EMP generator that incapacitates any vehicles or drones falling within its radius. The catch is that using an item earned from an increased rank depletes the experience meter, forcing players to think strategically instead of placing powerful items anywhere without penalty. Ranks are also reset to zero after each round, so there is no persistent level of experience in Frontlines outside of a specific battlefield. 

With hard fought battles, simple controls, and destructive abilities associated with the four main roles, Frontlines' multiplayer offers hours of addictive fun, especially on the 32-player dedicated servers. Yet all in not rosy on the multiplayer front. There are not nearly enough dedicated servers supporting ranked matches (or the game's max of 50 simultaneous players), so those that are there fill up quickly. Another strange issue is that voice communication is limited to a four-man squad, so you aren't able to directly talk to fellow teammates unless they are part of your close-knit group. The biggest problem thus far, however, has been sporadic instances of lag associated with user-created games.

Medal of Distinction

Most of the multiplayer issues can be easily addressed, however, and the action in Frontlines: Fuel of War is so good that you can live with a few rough spots here and there. Those hoping for a strong single-player campaign should consider Frontlines a rental at best, as the entire experience is over within six hours. Yet if your Xbox Live itch hasn't been scratched by either Call of Duty 4 or Halo 3, consider moving Frontlines to the top of your sold