Awaken: Front Line is a new and challenging shooter strategy game where you must defend the city from mutant. The mutants are an experiment gone extremely wrong by the military in attempts to create a super-soldier. In this game, you are sent into the city with three gunman and you must upgrade them, buy them new equipment and guns, to defend against evermore dangerous waves of mutants. This is truly a challenging game that’ll take you a few runs to find a rythm and maximized your survival chances. I’d like to think of Awaken: Front Line as a top-down The Last Stand (1, or 2), or Mud and Blood, but with more realistic elements, such as better stats, ammo dumps, a better health system (in my opinion) and more. If you’re looking for an exciting strategy game that will challenge you then look no further than Awaken: Front Line.

Awaken: Front Line

This game was actually more difficult than I had anticipated. I originally went with normal mode wanting a little bit of challenge, but eventually around wave thirty or so, some of my best units started to die off. The difficulty ramp actually seems to build upon how many times you’ve played the game. The more you’ve played, the greater your knowledge on future waves and what will actually happen. After each play I began to customize my interaction with the game to survive longer. This is a neat concept because it creates a great replay value system where after each play and, hopefully, you’ve made it further than before, you say, “Maybe I can change this” or “Maybe I can change that” to where you want to go back and see if you can reach a higher wave on a new run. My biggest tip is to recruit new unit early on in the game. Beware, hiring too many new units early on is a recipe for disaster; if there is too many units then it will be hard for them to level-up individually.

The gameplay was very unique. I’ve thought to myself before why this concept hadn’t been done before, or hadn’t been executed well enough to attract enough attention, and I think that Awaken: Front Line has perfectly executed this concept and has made it very enjoyable and addictive. One of the main reasons that I think the game to be so unique is that, unlike in most survival shooters, where you just fire upon the enemy and hold them off for as long as you can, Awaken: Front Line takes it to another level where you must constantly move your troops around, whether to get more ammo, after running out, or healing themselves, or trying to reach a new objective. It makes the game very interactive, where I feel that similar games have failed on. Overall, the gameplay was very unique and I found the game to be unique and addictive.

The artwork is all done by Ramos Emanuel, who I’ve known for a little over a year now. You can find a lot more of his pixel art work in the Prophets of Pixels thread (1)(2) on Kongregate, which I currently run. I really like the pixel art that Ramos has been doing and it is always very detailed and has its own style. I’ve seen Ramos spriting humans and armors for over a year now and they continuously look better and better. The guns where also very unique and even though most of them were based off of currently existing guns, Ramos gave them a bit of a futuristic retouch to make them fit in with the game. I do feel that a couple of things could have been improved though. There should have been some sort of shadows coming off the buildings, crates, soldiers, and cars. The game looked a little flat, but besides that, the artwork was very admirable.

Awaken: Front Line was accompanied by the best music for the job. It was very energetic and worked perfectly with the shooter theme. The sound effects were also very good and didn’t drown out the music, which is a big plus in my book. The gun shots sounded perfect and varied upon what weapon you were using. The zombie sound effects were well incorporated and gave you a good heads up when they were coming. Overall, sound effects were smartly used and helped create a wonderful atmosphere.

All in all, Awaken: Front Line is a top-notch strategy game that got you thinking in the long run and kept you in a frantic pace for most of the game. Anyone that has enjoyed games like The Last Stand, or Mud and Blood, will definitely enjoy this game. In review, the difficulty was a very exciting part of the game. I hate it when games are too easy, or too hard and this game was just perfect and tended to lean in a more difficult direction, but in a way that you knew that with a little adjustment the next time around you’ll be able to get even further. The gameplay was unique and I don’t believe it has been done too many times. I really enjoy being able to upgrade the stats on my unit and then buy weapons, partially, though my stats. The artwork was really good and the game had a very dark theme but I can’t help feeling that with a little tweaking it could have a little more needed dimension, but nevertheless, the game looks excellent. Finally, the music worked perfectly for the game. I thought that it matched the game well and that the sound effects matched equally well. Overall, this is one of the best games that I’ve come across this year and I’m hoping for more from the Awaken series. Be sure to check out the game today on Kongregate!

Play Awaken: Front Line on Kongregate!