Frontline

Your mission? Invade enemy territory and knock out the fortress. To do it, you'll have to travel over tricky terrain and fight against overwhelming odds at every step.

Evade attacks, search and destroy lumbering tanks! Storm the river bridge to face your most difficult challenge: the enemy fort! You must demolish it or die. And if you succeed?

A new assignment is yours on another front, against a more experienced army. There's no rest, no relaxation, no letting down your guard.

You're in the Army now!
Frontline is one of the best games for the 2600 if you like war type games. This is another of Jess LaFleur's choice games out of his personal collection meaning, the game was most likely made AFTER 1983 and is also most likely graphically good looking. This game was made in 1984 during the Video Game crash. This game has a rarity of 4, meaning it was either most likely very popular, or was sold easily just before the video game crash.

This is one of the best games I have ever seen some from Coleco for the 2600. At this point I am sure that Coleco had quit trying to make the 2600 look like a bad system in comparison to their superior ColecoVision and decided that any money that could be made regardless of what console it was one was a good idea.

The Game
In this game you are a soldier with a gun. So hey, you aren't completely helpless! Your goal is to get as far north as you possibly can to hopefully destroy the enemy fortress. That will be rather hard if all you have is a gun and a million other enemy forces attacking you. But hey, what's this? There are TANKS YOU CAN TAKE OVER! Yep, you can hop into a tank and drive along. Not only is there tanks, but there are TWO different tanks, heavy and light. Heavy tanks toss out some rather big BOMBS while light tanks can zip around and shoot bullets at any passing by enemy.

Graphics
The graphics in Frontline are very well done, there is multiple scenery as you progress into the game. It is very comforting to see such quality from a company that gave us 2600 Donkey Kong. The sprites are a little odd looking and instead of a soldier you look a bit like an English policeman but you can tell you ARE a soldier and that is good enough for me, The multicoloured animated sprites are good looking but the tanks are rather blockish. Blue in colour the tanks look quite good.

Sound
Well there is little music in Frontline but that's a good thing. Would you rather them spend precious bytes of information packing in a song when you could be seeing another scenery appear before you? Exactly. The sound effects are about average but sound as good as the 2600 could make them. The explosions, the foot marching, the gunshots all sound nice.

Control
The controls in Frontline are just as good as most 2600 games, I have no complaints about them. It's easy to maneuver your character and easy to do all that is needed to do on this game. I really have no beef with the controls.

Overall
Overall this is a good looking, good playing game. While there is not a huge amount of playability after playing it for about a month, who can blame you that you got a little bored with a game that took you a month to master? The 4 modes of play make it very hard for you in the long run. Even the first level is hard enough to get through without dying a million times. If you want to see something GOOD by Coleco, then this is the game to get.