PixlBit

    A full day put into Enemy Front chasing down achievements. I played to get all the mission based achievements, and while I was there, looked for secrets I'd missed. It was my second full playthrough of the game, with some extra levels played partially a third time for the drawing-a-resistance-logo-on-a-Warsaw-wall-14-times achievement.

     The only two mission based ones I didn't complete were the ones in the POW camp. One is for rescuing Dietrich without alerting anyone. I tried it several times but failed. That place is just really tough to break into, although I think if I could get past the front defenses, I could do it. The other one was for releasing the other prisoners and making sure they escape. I botched this in both my playthroughs. The first time, I didn't act fast enough, and they got killed running for the gate; and the second time, I spent too long eliminating all the guards. When I went to get the prisoners, they had vanished. So I'll have to give those another try some other time. 

    I found probably 75% of the secret eagle wing medals on my first playthrough, so I went through the incomplete levels again very slowly and combed every corner. Once I did that, and I still had a handfull I hadn't found, I looked up a guide. The ones I didn't find were in spots nearly impossible to see. In a few cases I actually couldn't see the medal on the ground but the prompt came up when I was on top of it. Some of those were seriously unfair. I would've been looking for a long, long time if I hadn't used a guide and may not have ever found a few of them. It made me think designers shouldn't hide things so well. I mean, it's a certain kind of torture to have to crawl on hands and knees under every crevice of a game just for a few achievement points. 

    Then there were the drawings. There are certain walls in the Warsaw levels of the game where you can draw the symbol of the resistance. I got 3/4 of them after my two playthoughs, but to get the rest I looked up a guide. They are all supposed to show up as a hazy outline when you get close to tell you to draw there, but some really don't show up at all. Some of those I found in the guide were in places I might never have checked, and I wasn't about to bump into every wall I came across to find them. How crazy would that have been. "What are you doing?" "I'm bumping this wall to see if it wants a resistance logo painted on it." "Wako!" So I'm not guilty about looking up a guide. 

   So whats' left? The two POW mission achievements, two for each of the next two difficulty levels (I don't think I'll try those. Casual difficulty was challenge enough), and a handful of multiplayer achivements which look easy if I go get a second copy of the game so my friend and I can do them. I'm not too fond of playing random people online. You know how that usually goes. 

    And that's about it for Enemy Front. I really grew to like the game after all this. The levels are quite expansive with lots of room to approach a situation from different angles. The variety of locations too is impressive: there's rural areas, cities, and factories and ruined castles. I learned how to take down two soldiers by taking one hostage, then shooting the other, and then finishing off the hostage. You can take a hostage around a lot of soldiers, but those guys are mean and will shoot both you and their friend without hesitation. Now that's not fair.

     I'm still not thrilled about the weapon controls which, I guess, are meant to be more realistic and so there's less a feeling of accuracy, but sometimes I would shoot from my hip and totally miss a point blank shot. Really? Do I have to iron-sight every shot even at point blank range? I found that a little weird and annoying.

     The weapon selection, or lack of one, is also annoying to me. You have a pistol slot and two other weapon slots which are mapped to the d-pad. You hit "Y" to go from pistol to main weapon but have to hit the d-pad to switch main weapons. I didn't even know that 'til I was half way through the game the first time and was wondering why mystery weapons were appearing in my hands when I ran out of ammo. I really wanted better control of my weapons and be able to switch them quicker.

    Annoyances aside though, this game was pretty fun. Not as laugh out loud fun as Wolfenstein: New Order, but fun when you need a shooter and there's nothing AAA-new going on.