Rising Front (PC) Preview

The thunder of hundreds (if not thousands) of guns firing, the wiz of bullets overhead, and seeing Harold slump back into the trench without a limb, this is the chaos that is Rising Front. As a low-poly re-creation of one of the most horrible events in history, games have for decades tried to recreate all-out war as seen in what Sherman Potter would call “dubbya dubbya 1 and dubbya dubbya 2.” I’ve said a few times with things like Verdun and Tannenberg appearing on the Epic Games Store that it tries to glorify the time, glitzing up one of the darkest periods of our recent history so 12-year-olds can swear at each other.

Sandstorm Studios’ Rising Front does something we don’t see too often outside of indie development, create a battle simulation for single-player. Don’t let this introduction suggest it is perfect. Releasing into Early Access in January there are issues from bugs to game design. Nonetheless, similar to the fantastic Battlefield ’em up from SteelRaven7, it is the scale that is the most impressive with this simple and correctly depressing simulation. That alongside some interesting twists to the typical battle simulation makes Rising Front interesting.

The biggest difference is of course the single-player focus, which allows for several different options of gameplay that might not otherwise be the case. The real-time strategy aspect is both a hit and a miss for me. On the one hand, the sandbox is the first thing you’ll probably click given it is on the far left of the three options of play and the quickest to get into. Then on the other, you have a lack of difficulty in the scenarios already created. In the sandbox, you control both sides of the battle, and that allows you to create a wall for yourself. However, in scenarios, you’re actually fighting the AI as you probably should.

It doesn’t matter if you’re on the side of the Allies or the Central Powers, the difficulty is determined by a few factors and only a couple of those may be within your control. Sandbox mode aside, there may be a scenario creator but no real way to edit or delete (as far as I found) your scenarios once created. Within battles, you have select units that you can spawn and these units cost in-game credit which you’ll earn as play continues. Depending on the starting amount you have and how much you’ll gain as time passes, you can make life difficult for yourself or the other side.

Another way the difficulty is heightened (outside of your control) that is often noted in the Steam reviews which I glanced at is the “aim bot” AI mowing you down easily. This isn’t your mum’s Battlefield anymore kido! The reality of World War 1 was that if you were stupid enough to go over the top, your body would resemble flying mince heading back into your trench. I know I’m not one to enjoy realism in my games, and the credit thing certainly gamifies the industrial power of each side, but for something resembling World War 1, that slaughter is rather important to the theme.

Testing out scenarios or balancing out the game, the current state works on a base level, but your “strategy” comes down to “can I be bothered?” You can eventually push across no man’s land to take the other side in what is effectively a capture-the-flag scenario, but there is no win state at the time of writing. If I had to balance out the game properly I’d have both you and a random soldier on the other side as commanders. Both of you are trying to kill each other and take the other side, there is a fog-of-war on what you aren’t controlling, and you both use the credits you gain almost as quickly as you gain them to throw bodies against the wall.

Rather than creating one win state and balancing out Rising Front, this thematically correlates to the war effort by both sides and gives you a second objective. Additionally making a rule that only commanders can kill other commanders would create a scenario where you both need to stay near your men to stay secure. Fighting an “unknown” strategy and opposing a brutal onslaught of bodies flying towards you with reckless abandon is the only way I think of that works for the WWI theme and increases the difficulty without becoming overbearing.

Rising Front might be wrapped in a slightly buggy casing with a few problems and I could see why many have and will bounce off this somewhat experimental idea. The controls aren’t great at the moment either, especially as you have to hold down Ctrl to crouch instead of being a toggle while Z lets you hit the ground like a Drowning Pool hit. This of course greatly reduces the chance of being hit by the AI that looks at you as if you walked into the classroom wearing an SS uniform to a rephrased “God Save our Führer” playing on a cassette tape.

To say the opposing side can be cheaty is sometimes an understatement if you go in for a Blitzkrieg. It might come as some surprise to those used to their Call of Duty and Battlefield multiplayer games, but when there is a collection of 40 bolt-action rifles pointed squarely at your head, you’re going to resemble neutral cheese. For an audience that enjoys familiarity and hand-holding to controls and tutorials, Rising Front will be confusing. It wasn’t until quite a few hours in that I realized I could zoom in on the command map, for example, and that’s important when you’re planning the 1914 Christmas trench raid.

The performance can also be variable depending on several factors that seem would be handled fairly well by most up-to-date PCs. Sure enough, Rising Front doesn’t tax any of my hardware in particular. Nonetheless, when it comes to a number greater than a handful of units at a time on the map, your frame rate will drop. When the two sides collide, the frame rate will dig its own trench a little deeper than your own. A wild guess would suggest that loading several hundred bullets being fired, whizzing past your ears, and impacting sound effects at once would greatly affect the frame rate to some capacity.

There are ways to hem the frame rate in, such as the use of bombardments to cull some of the numbers but that’s not as precise sometimes. Otherwise, you could use T and Y to steady your shots as they slow down time and stop it, which I assume is for use when in the command map ordering more troops to hold off Jerry. That’s why I find there is a problem with performance: The point of the tactics of this war as Lord Melchett put it in Blackadder The Third, is to do the obviously stupid thing because the other side wouldn’t think you would do that to your own people.

The reality of this war is no better summed up than a line in the tutorial from The Great War: Western Front, “your men are needed to shore up the line.” It was flagrantly known that many of the young faces were lying about being 18 (age of conscription), and as quickly those young men went, they’d be returned home or a letter to fearful parents would take their place. As battles played out under the watchful eye of the Grim Reaper, politicians and higher-ups begged for more and more men under the lie that “this is it, this is the war to end all wars.“

Although the maps try to encompass this harsh reality and there are multiple trenches across several of the maps, it is difficult to believe you are truly fighting in trench warfare. The reality of course is that if you tried to cross “No Man’s Land,” named as such because it was home to untold death, you would become nothing more than fertilizer for the sludge in your unit’s boots. In theory, trench warfare is a game of tug-of-war. While Rising Front is trying to get the feeling of that oppression that death hangs over your every moment, some of that is lost in practice.

Ultimately, as it stands Rising Front has some great ideas in place and a massive amount of potential in being an indie single-player focused Battlefield ’em up. However, to say it is spit-polished and shined like your boots should be would be far from the truth. Experimental is what I’d describe it as, and though that can be taken as somewhat of a copout for the issues at hand, I think there is a lot that could be ironed out too. I just hope Sandstorm Studios sticks with this Early Access title and gives its unique game in a multiplayer-focused world the time it deserves.