Frontline Commando: D-Day

Glu Mobile put five campaigns and 145 missions front and center when it released Frontline Commando: D-Day for free on iOS and Google Play on March 28, 2013. The game took the cover-shooting formula from Glu’s modern-day Frontline Commando and moved it to June 1944, with the Normandy landings as its stage.

What Is Frontline Commando: D-Day

It is a third-person cover shooter in which you play an Allied soldier fighting German infantry from behind walls, sandbags and wrecked vehicles. You never walk freely around the map. Instead the game moves you between fixed cover points, and your job at each one is to clear the area before pushing on. Glu recreated the beach landings at Juno, Sword, Utah, Gold and Omaha, and the missions branch out from there into battles based on real events of the campaign.

How Cover And Aiming Work In Frontline Commando

Three buttons do most of the work. One pops your soldier out of cover, a second brings up the scope for precise aiming, and the third fires. Ducking back down protects you while you reload, so the rhythm of a fight is a steady loop of rising, aiming, firing and dropping again. When an area is clear, the soldier sprints forward on his own with only a little sideways control, and you have to steer around minefields and jump obstacles to reach the next point in one piece. That sprint between cover points is what separated Frontline Commando: D-Day from simpler shooting gallery games of the time.

Set Pieces And Weapons

Not every mission is about a rifle. The game mixes in heavier jobs to break up the cover fights:

• Manning anti-aircraft guns to shoot down bombers
• Firing bazookas at armoured tanks
• Operating stationary guns and calling artillery strikes
• Destroying cannons with explosives

You start with a rifle and grenades, and machine guns and other historical weapons follow. The environments are partly destructible, so cover you rely on can crumble under fire, which keeps you watching your position.

What Reviewers Said About Frontline Commando: D-Day

Pocket Gamer gave it four out of five, praising the presentation and how easy the action was to pick up. The same review found the overbearing voice acting grating after a while and called the push toward purchases irksome. Its main point about money was a fair one: the campaign could be completed without paying, yet the best weapons were locked behind in-app purchases, so players who never spent stayed with the basic kit for the whole war.

Where The Game Went After 2013

The last Android builds reached version 3.0.4 under the package name com.glu.flcn_new, and the Google Play listing has since been removed without a public date. Glu, now part of Electronic Arts after the 2021 acquisition, never released a remaster. Builds of that age were also not made for modern 64-bit-only phones, so old copies are unlikely to install on a current device.

Glu did follow it with a sequel, Frontline Commando: WW2 Shooter, whose iOS version history begins in September 2014. It moved the fighting to Belgium, Italy and Germany and added assault, sharpshooter and rocket launcher missions, keeping the same cover-to-cover structure.

Who Liked It Most

The game suited players who wanted short, cinematic shooting on a phone without learning twin-stick controls. Fans of World War II history also enjoyed seeing all five Normandy beaches on a small screen, even if the missions themselves played much the same from beach to beach.