What do you get when you combine free gaming with one of the great PC FPS franchises? Battlefield Play4Free, and awesomeness.
Conan, what are the best things in life?
To download a free game, have it be a lot of fun, and to hear the lamentations of your targets.
Yes!
Okay, so we may be doing a serious disservice to one of the greatest movie scenes of all time, but come on – if the above aren’t some of the best things, we’ll eat our hat. And, that being a truism I am sure we can all agree on, one game right now sums up those best things.
The recently released Battlefield Play4Free.
This latest addition to the Battlefield franchise takes the classic maps from Battlefield 2 and combines them with the classes and gameplay elements from Bad Company 2. Add in a system whereby you can purchase – with real cash dollars – Battlefunds to upgrade your soldier and gear, as well as a more temporary way to earn upgrades and weapons, and you’ve got a very tasty little shooter.
Battlefield Play4Free is very easy to get into. It’s a relatively small download (about a GB), and you then launch the game out of your browser of choice. Graphical options are limited to detail settings and screen size, and those graphics really aren’t anything to write home about – it very much feels like a free game based on an older engine.
However, that doesn’t stop the game being an awful lot of fun, and damn well-implemented.
Picking your soldier is done online before downloading and launching the game. You choose class, and some basic looks for your hardened killer, then get downloading. At launch, you can tweak settings and have a look through all the nice toys you’ll soon be able to upgrade, but one thing you might not find is a server browser – there isn’t one!
That said, clicking on the Play Now button does the job just fine; we were connected to what felt like local servers without issue. We can only surmise, though, as the game doesn’t display ping. But nor did any of our sessions feel laggy or unresponsive. You can book a server yourself, or bookmark particularly good ones, and Play4Free does have a friends system as well if you want to keep track of mates and where they’re playing.
Oddly, limited as it is, it’s one of the smoothest server systems we’ve seen in a while, even compared to recent commercial releases. Hell, it’s smoother than Bad Company 2 was at launch!
When you do finally get into the game, it’s like some weird homecoming. Though lacking the polish and detail of more modern games, or the destructibility of recent Battlefield titles, these maps are still very well designed and a lot of fun to fight over. The addition of the Bad Company 2 classes freshens up the gameplay, too. The ballistics, while not as challenging as BC2, are still a lot of fun to play with, and while we do miss being able to blow up buildings into rubble, there can be no denying just how tense some of the fighting can get.
Upgrading your gear can be done on a permanent basis, with real money, or you can upgrade it for a set amount of time. This is done with two different kinds of in-game currency – one purchased, one earned in-game, much like CounterStrike. For instance, you can spend 500 points to get access to a better assault rifle for 24 hours, or access to bandages and so on. It’s a good balance between the micro-transactions that make the game profitable, and not wanting to make the game inaccessible to those not wanting to spend real money.
And hey, if you love the game, spending a few bucks to get some permanent extras isn’t much to ask given the game itself is free. But even if you don’t spend the cash, the game’s still a lot of fun, We can see a lot of Battlefield Play4Free in our future.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012