Battlefield Heroes

One peculiar ramification of Heroes' character development system is that you can't change between your archetypes in any given game. Because it's part of a larger character-creation system complete with name and class for a particular profile, you're locked in for that match. Join a public server full of gunners, and you can't simply swap to commando to balance things out, which was always one of the fundamental joys of the Battlefield games.

The other fundamental joy, of course, being the vehicles. In Heroes these are jeeps, tanks, and planes. The jeeps are brilliantly fun, and allow the passengers to fire as you move, for that Wacky Races-with-machineguns feel. It's not particularly practical for any serious play, but there's little doubt that high-speed slapstick shenanigans are best achieved by a jeep-bound crew. They're also pretty good for that early race-to-capture moment.

Better, perhaps, are the planes. Those carry passengers on their wings, passengers who can jump off and parachute back to Earth. I've yet to manage to kill anyone on the ground in a plane - because there's so much cover, because it's easy to get shot down by AA emplacements, and because it goes too fast - but dogfighting with your aerial opposite number is a fun time.

Probably the most serious of the vehicles in a practical power-balance way is the tank. As long as you can keep nasty bomb-lobbing infantry away from it, you've got a pretty powerful tool on your side. The main gun doesn't do all that much damage, but the big knock-back area-of-effect is great for multiple enemies, especially if you can get the shell into where they're holed up, waiting for people to head for the capture points.

Vehicular entertainments aside, the most enjoyable aspect of Battlefield Heroes has, so far, been trying to work out how to be most awesome with the tools at your disposal. As with many team-based games, it's possible to be very awesome, if you're able to stick with chums. The game definitely rewards close-proximity to your fellows, with your heals and focused firepower making use of the heavy cover around capture points to devastate enemies who turn up in their ones and twos.

Of course most of the time there is no cohesion, and you end up having to having to play for optimal-loner status. The gunner or commando generally represent the best way to do this: the commando's sniper rifle is the railgun of the game, and allows you to deal huge damage from a considerable distance. Any twitch gamer worth his caffeine addiction is going to find that chappy all too easy to dominate with. This is probably the weakest design decision in the game, which should clearly have focused on close-range gunfights and vehicle silliness. Sniper-dominated games are groaningly dull.

In summary, this free Battlefield game comes with two complimentary kneejerk responses. "Hey, this is nothing like proper grown-up Battlefield!" is one of them. "Cartoon? Team Fortress 2 is cartoon, therefore grumble-mumble!" is the other. Neither are actually relevant, because this is very much its own game, with its own innate delights, peculiar slow pace, poorly-executed class mechanic, and weird micro-transaction married to level advancement persistence.

It's going to be interesting to see how the project develops, too: will EA see fit to introduce regular updates? Will we get new maps? New weapons? A new class? These four maps are already getting a little old, a week after release. Whatever the outward evolution, it's been an interesting experiment in juggling multiplayer genre conventions, and I don't expect it to be the last.