PAX: Hands-On With Battlefield Heroes

Among the long lines and crowds of PAX, the PC freeplay area was a breath of fresh air: hundreds of systems networked and loaded up, ready for anyone to just sit down and play... and they just happened to have a pre-launch, working versions of Battlefield Heroes on them!

As I'm doing a little catching up on this game as I'm writing this, I'm finding that the "closed Beta" status that it has will most likely be protracted. The trick, and I still haven't figured this out myself, is how they're going to monetize it (Battlefield Heroes is going to be a free-to-play game), and apparently the point where they start turning on the revenue may not be immediate.

Regardless, what's important to me is that they took the Battlefield brand, which to me stands for the last genre-busting Team FPS made, and made a new game out of it. That's a big deal. But for this game, it's no more than a gimmick. This isn't a Battlefield game any more than COD4 is and that's apparent in the first 10 seconds of gameplay -- that's a tough note to get started on for me.

Good:
- "Instant action"-style matching is a pretty cool feature -- if it's executed correctly, which so far it looks to do.
- Very accessible gameplay, true to the "casual" target audience.
- Played and looked great on an extremely mediocre machine = very reasonable minimum spec.

Bad:
- This is as far from a tactical game as you can get, and while that in itself is not a bad thing, this is Battlefield, not TF2. And the real problem is that nothing in this game bests either franchise.
- I'm really not interested in more cartoon-style shooters. Valve pulled it off -- fine -- let's leave it at that.
- Pretty basic, ho-hum array of vehicles and weapons.
- In general, nothing pops and says "This is a great new Team FPS!!". I'd rather pay for something better.

These are my impressions after playing a BETA version. I'd expect a better game when its more widely released, and because of that I didn't even mention some of the stuff I saw that was obviously just not finished yet (like how I couldn't pick a new class in the middle of a match). The cool part is that when this thing comes out, you won't need a review to tell you if you should get it or not... it'll be free.