Well, I had intended to start the new game yesterday, but it turned out there were some pretty sizable downloads available for it, and by the time I got them it was fairly late.

So, tonight I started working on Frontlines: Fuel of War, the gift mentioned in previous comments. The impressions on the forums were pretty favourable, and it’s holding up pretty well so far. It’s a squad-based shooter along the lines of CoD4, though the other squad members seem to be there mostly as distractions and all the heavy lifting is up to you, of course.

The weapons are mostly fairly traditional and I didn’t vary from the standard assault rifle and rocket launcher much, but every once in a while you get to pick up a special weapon like flying drones or a controllable robot gun, and they’re always fun. In the second mission I used a little mini-helicopter to take out a tank by circle-strafing around it and pelting it with rockets while it uselessly tried to aim its main cannon at it.

You also get to ride around in vehicles on a fairly regular basis, and they pack a lot of firepower. Controlling them was a bit weird at first, since it varies depending on whether they have a turret or not, but I think I’m getting the hang of it.

I’ve only done the first two missions so far though, and it looks like the next one is a stealth/sniping one. Seems like the single-player campaign will be pretty short since there are only seven missions, but the multiplayer is supposed to be pretty meaty. It’s too bad there’s no co-op mode for the single-player campaign, though you should be able to form a squad of friends in the multi at least.