It's a fight just to get it to install!
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s load up Frontlines: Fuel of War and see how it plays. Seeing as this is branded up as Games for Windows game, I thought I’d give Frontlines: Fuel of War a whirl under Vista. Big mistake. Never in my life have I experienced an install that takes as long as Frontlines: Fuel of War. I know the game comes on two DVDs but seriously, 45 minutes later and I’m still watching a progress bar crawl along.
Click for larger imageIt took so long to install I had time to answer all the unread mails in my inbox, tidy up the office, write this rather pissed off mail to our Director of Communications:
“First 15” – Frontlines: Fuel of War
Well, I was gonna write about the first fifteen minutes of gameplay but I’m now 45 minutes into the installation of Frontlines: Fuel of War.
I don’t mind long install times but when a game comes on TWO DVDs and appears to thoroughly scour and decompress each of them, I get a bit concerned. My general rule of thumb is as follows: If my monitor goes into stand-by mode, the install is taking too long.
So after two stand-by black screens, Frontlines: Fuel of War was installed.. and immediately Vista reported a patch for it. So I stupidly clicked ‘Yes’ and headed off to the KAO Studios website where I clicked the appropriate link.
And 20 minutes later the rather large 183Mb patch is still only 14% done as the site streams the patch at a heady 30KB/Sec…
So here’s my “First 15” take on Frontlines: Fuel of War:
If you’re the kind of weirdo that gets off to watching progress bars or likes nothing better than living on the edge by tweaking your network settings as a data transfer takes place, then Frontlines: Fuel of War is most definitely for you. For everyone else, you’ll have to settle with reading the manual where you’ll see that it all looks suspiciously like Battlefield 2142… and you’ll probably go off and play that instead… Actually, thinking about it, you’ll go off and play any game at all rather than watch a daft-arse progress bar crawl its way along.
Nice one THQ, you’ve bored the hell out of me before we even got going.
So there you go. That’s the install experience under Vista. And yes, before you ask the machine is fully up to date with the latest drivers, hotfixes and all the stuff you have to constantly install just to get Vista to not fall over every ten minutes.
Click for larger imageNow you could say I was daft to grab the patch but I very firmly believe in reviewing a title patched to the latest version at the time of the review, hence me sitting there waiting all that time. But annoyingly, even after patching, when you go to start the game it announces there’s a new patch available and would you like to get it now... Clicking ‘yes’ takes you to the same damn patch you’ve just downloaded and installed!
For the sake of completeness, I booted out of Vista and into XP where the install went much faster but still asked me to grab a patch, which is fine. The patch in question is the exact same one as Vista and, unsurprisingly, you’re still told there’s an update available every time you try and start the damn game.
Click for larger imageNow you might think this is a bit of an overreaction on my part but think of it this way: every time you start Frontlines: Fuel of War it tells you there’s a patch. Now given the buggy nature of the game, you’ll be tempted to go and see if it’s a new patch or not and of course it’ll be the old patch you already have. Why the hell isn’t the game checking version numbers and automatically deciding it’s up to date? Gah!