Front Line (video game)

1982 video game
The arcade game received mixed reviews upon release, with praise for its originality but criticism for its difficulty. Following its North American debut at the Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) show in November 1982, Video Games magazine published two reviews. One review said "Taito has a knack for coming up with some of the most original and offbeat games in the business" with Front Line being "an example" of this, while noting the controls are similar to Taito's earlier Western Gun (1975). The other review listed it among the top ten "Misses" of the show and stated it was a "war game with a lot of potential, but also with a firing mechanism that's so difficult to maneuver it ruins the game". Computer and Video Games stated that, despite the initial difficulty, "the action really takes off" with the tank and it's "worth persevering with" until then.

Front Line was one of the first video games to feature a ground combat theme and grenades, a precursor to many similarly themed games of the mid to late 1980s. It was one of the earliest overhead run and gun video games, preceding Capcom's Commando (1985) by several years. Front Line was the basis for SNK's TNK III (1985), known as T. A. N. K. in Japan and Europe. A programmer from SNK discovered Front Line at an arcade and thought that SNK could go further with the gameplay format. The team improved on Front Line with the addition of a rotary joystick. In turn, SNK went on to combine elements of T. A. N. K. with Commando (1985) to produce the arcade hit Ikari Warriors (1986). Jaleco's Field Combat (1985) also has similar gameplay to Front Line. A Game Boy Color spin off entitled Sgt. Rock: On the Frontline was published by Taito in 2000. The game follows the template of the original arcade game, but is set within the DC Comics universe. The arcade original was included in Taito Memories Gekan for the PlayStation 2 console in 2005, and in Taito Legends 2 for the PlayStation 2, Xbox and Windows platforms in 2006. The Famicom version was released for the Virtual Console service in Japan in June 2007 for the Wii and January 2014 for the Nintendo 3DS. The game was released for the Switch via the Nintendo eShop in February 2019 by Hamster Corporation as part of their Arcade Archives series. It was released for the PlayStation 4 in January 2018 as part of the same series.