Heroes of World War £2

Chances are, I’ll never buy an “I’m with stupid T-Shirt”. I’m also 99% sure that I’ll never drop 140 space bucks on a Pirate Hat or a wrist watch. But as long as enough people do, Battlefield Heroes (which just leapt from closed Beta to a full(ish) release) will remain successful.

The free to play model has previously been synonymous with kitschy Korean kart racers and Chinese MMOs, but with Electronic Arts launching three games under their “Play4Free” brand (Heroes, Battleforge and Need for Speed: World Online), it’s obvious that this could break from the Asian market and enter the West as a viable and successful way of publishing content.

As promised, there’s no instant way to win-with-your-wallet by buying guns or abilities (the game’s perk system), instead leaving the store to outfits and taunts. The game has two currencies: Valour Points, earned through successful frags and completed micro-missions, and Battle Funds, exchanged for real currency. The latter is only used for buying completely superficial items, and a couple of widgets – time sensitive “cheats” that will boost your EXP and Valour Point intakes.

In fact, most things in the game are time sensitive. Unless you want to shell out some serious dough, your aviator sunglasses or tattooed arms will disappear into the ether after a month. If you want a Black Sombrero, you can have a 30 day rental for 90p, but £3.60 lets you have it forever.

As someone who would never consider such a negligible purchase, I don’t really have any comments towards the “virtual hat rental” industry, but it’s a little off-putting to this virtual-window shopper. The in-game-currency items share the time sensitive element (although, with no permanent option), but while that sensibly stops you amassing an unstoppable army of guns and abilities, who cares if you have a complete collection of amusing t-shirts?

The aforementioned EXP and VP boosts are the only real-money updates that cause concern; for a few quid you can boost the rate that you accumulate these points, which in turn allows you access to new unlocks (with EXP) and the money to access them (with VP). Still, as long as there are no weapons or abilities that are only purchasable with real life pounds, it’s hard to care. The developers of these games know that if the balance is ever toppled, the player base will just move on – losing valuable advert impressions.

As for the game itself, Battlefield Heroes easily impresses. Enemies take a few too many shots and the vehicles are a little stodgy to control, but it devolves its FPS roots into an accessible and enjoyable shooter, filled with caricatures and ludicrous scenes. Things considered funny glitches in Battlefield 2, like hopping on a plane’s wing for a cheeky lift, are instated as features in Heroes.

The game does lose a number of needed features in its attempt at making Heroes accessible and jargon-free. You’ll certainly miss the server browser, and helpful titbits like ping are nowhere to be seen, but making it a chore to play with friends is a really uninviting. Getting your buddy to search for a game, crossing your fingers that there’s a free space on the server, and then following them in from the friends browser, is a far cry from the accessibly that Heroes champions.

After playing Heroes for the better part of today, I think I like the Free to Play model. Battlefield is not phoned in, not crudely put together and not constructed in such a way that all paths lead to advertising and storefronts. DICE promised no in-game ads and no balancing-changing purchases, and for the most part they’ve stuck to it. The game hasn’t yet got any proper ads (instead, filling space with cute mock-products), but as the player base grows, EA should be able to score some top advertisers.

I never thought it would work, but if there are enough shmucks buying novelty fake-hats, fake-monocles and fake-robot dance emotes to make my games free, how can I complain?