Review: Battlefield Heroes (PC)

Now, you know me. I love the Battlefield games. The weapons, the vehicles, the kameraderie, the sixty-four player multiplayer, the chaos, the non stop action. Every thing about them screams "THIS IS HOW A WAR GAME SHOULD BE!". Now, you probably also know that I am the meanest person in the world (and also the one with the least money),  which means I always buy games ages after they come out. I bought the BF2 Complete Collection in Game for a tenner three months ago. I downloaded the expansion pack for BF2142 from the EA store for roughly the same price. Hell, I got my base copy of BF2142 about two years ago free in a buy-one-get-one-free offer at Gamestation (which, incidentally, is a lot better value than Game).  But I still have had to spend money to get my hands on these gaming goliaths. Not any more though. Not any more.

Battlefield Heroes has been in the pipeline for ages - it was scheduled for release last June, for goodness' sake. Styled as a "Free-to-play Cartoon Shooter", it did (and does) look worryingly like Team Fortress 2, but as we have seen before, the games industry is heavily based around taking other people's ideas and making them look like your own.  But TF2 cost money. This doesn't.

Heroes features the good old recognisable conquest mode seen in the other Battlefield games,  giving each team 50 tickets but no flags at the start of each round. Spawn times are 5 seconds (compared to previous Battlefield games' 15), allowing for less waiting and more action. Also, players do not spawn on flags, but close to the action, which means the end of long treks over to the Killing Fields only to find out why they are known as such. Killing enemies and holding more flags than the opposing army will reduces the number of  their tickets. The game has a matchmaking system to keep players of close levels together. Developers of the game had talked about levels going as high as 40 or 50 though currrently the cap is 30 , but I wouldn't know as my only character as of now is a level 5 Royal Gunner, which brings me onto an important point.

In the previous Battlefield games you created an account, picked a server and then picked what class you were when you were connected (your side was picked automatically to keep teams balanced). In Heroes, however, you create an account but before you can play, you must click on the "Create A Hero" button on the Heroes homepage, where you pick what side and what class your hero is. You can create as many as you like, but annoyingly (to one used to a single character), they all level up independently, which means if I suddenly felt like playing as a National commando (The two teams are the National Army (*cough* the Germans) and the Royal Army (*ahem* the British)) I would have to create a whole new character who would start at level 1 and not count towards my skill on my Gunner. See? I don't know about you, but I find this somewhat irritating.

Heroes is free to play becuase a) there is apparently in-game advertising (though I have yet to see any) and b) if you want to stand out, you can buy "battlefunds" with real money and purchase items of clothing for your character. This does seem a bit pointless to someone as mean as me, but I can imagine if you played the game a lot and wanted to look cool then why not? This system is a well-thouht-out one because though you can by clothes and that, you cannot buy anything that will give you an advantage in-game. New weapons are bought with Valour Points, which you gain my completing missions and killing or dealing damage to enemies. Frustratingly, though you can buy weapons, you only own them for a certain amount of time - you can choose to buy them for 7 days or 30, after which they disappear again. Advantages which do not go away are "abilities", which can be bought whenever you level up. Each class has six different ones which can each be levelled up to level 5 - adding up to the 30 levels you can advance to. There are some amusing ones, like the Gunner's "I eats grenades" which sucks in explosives around the player and adds them to their health, the Soldier's "6th Sense" which allows the player to see enemies through walls for a short amount of time and the Commando's "Stealth" which renders the player invisible until either it runs out or they fire a weapon. These abilites, in the true spirit of Battlefield reward players who play well and often rather than those who pay.

Apparently there are four maps, but the inability to choose which server you play on stops you being able to choose which map you play on and though I have played for at least 3-4 hours in total I have only been on two - Victory Village and Seaside Skirmish. Victory Village is an infantry map - that is, it is set in a town and there is only one vehicle for each team - a Jeep. Seaside Skirmish, on the other hand, is a lot larger and more open, with the full range of vehicles for each team - tanks, jeeps and planes. The planes are by far the most fun vehicles, but the combined mouse-keyboard control is confusing and takes some getting used to. There was also going to be a metagame over the whole of Europe, shown in the trailer, but that doesn't seem to have happened yet. This is, as I have just found out, because the game is apparently still in an open beta. But ohwells. They said it had been released properly. Thus I have reviewed it as such.

Overall, this game is great fun, for free, but as a serious game there are quite a few key flaws.

Nometet.com says:

+ FREE

+ Cartoony and amusing

+ Lots of (admittedly silly) action

- No way to choose which map you play on

- Have to level up different characters independently