Battlefield Heroes

Matches are invariably a brisk five to fifteen minutes, and seldom descend into stalemate. Once you're rolling, you can happily and seamlessly run from one into the next without stopping, and get showered in XP to level up your hero while doing so. Despite its limitations, Battlefield Heroes is an addictive romp already - but it's very far from being ready.

Most of the things that make the game unusual aren't in it yet. The website it's launched from is basic and slow, and doesn't feature the campaign-map meta-game DICE has talked about, or any of the social functions you might expect either. Even the character creation tool is very simple, leaving costume customisation to be done within the game client. There's no friends or lobby system to speak of, and matchmaking is haphazard at best.

More seriously, the game's levelling system hasn't been fully implemented yet, and remains something of a mystery. Battlefield Heroes' three classes - Soldier (sub machine guns, healing), Gunner (machine guns, shields and lots of health) and Commando (stealth, traps and sniping) - can all gain XP as they play, and also spend Hero Points to power up abilities and buy new ones. Missions - achievement-style challenges to destroy a certain number of tanks in one round, for example - can be picked up after level 5 in the current version of the game, and award Hero Points.

The relationship - if any - between levelling and Hero Points isn't clear yet, or indeed the purpose of levelling at all, since it doesn't seem to affect your character's stats. It will mostly likely unlock weapons and costumes, but at the moment these are all available from the beginning. Persistence, attachment to your character and a steady stream of unlocks are absolutely key to making a game like Battlefield Heroes work, and DICE hasn't showed its hand yet.

Character balance also needs work - although this goes with the beta-test territory. DICE's decision to extend the multiplayer shooter's flirtation with RPGs - already begun by the likes of Call of Duty 4 and its own Battlefield 2142 - into the territory of skill bars, buffs and cooldowns is a brave one, and will inevitably need a little ironing out.

All classes, as well as carrying primary and secondary weapons (machine gun and shotgun, or sniper rifle and knife/pistol in the Commando's case) can bandage themselves, throw explosives, and repair the vehicles they're in. In addition, the Captain can choose from a group heal ability, a knockback, stealth detection, fire damage on his bullets, and the self-explanatory Grenade Spam.

The Commando can go into stealth, increase his run speed, mark targets, poison his knife, lay explosive traps, and increase his rifle damage. The Gunner, meanwhile, gets a timed shield, sprint, increased machine gun accuracy, explosive kegs, and the ability to eat grenades for health. Each of these abilities can be upgraded through five levels of potency with Hero Points.

Balancing these against each other, the weapons (each type comes in three different flavours), the new third-person viewpoint, and the usual concerns of a multiplayer shooter is quite a challenge. The Gunner has been overpowered, and skill use in combat (you can use hotkeys, or scroll through them with the mouse wheel) hasn't really settled into a rhythm yet, but it definitely adds a more varied, gung-ho and slapstick element to your standard insta-death firefights. There's no reason to suspect DICE can't make the system work, but it might take a little time to straighten out the kinks.

This side of Battlefield Heroes will certainly sort itself out, and the core of the game - an ebullient redux of the deathmatch shooter for the WOW generation - is very solid, and can't help but be worth a hundred times more than the asking price of nothing at all. But whether it can grow from diverting freebie into the kind of moreish obsession that will have you reaching for your wallet for new trinkets and features is up to the game's character advancement system and web support. As it stands, these sides of Battlefield Heroes are completely unproven.