E3 2012: Warface: Crytek’s Free Shooter

Crytek’s free-to-play shooter stands out because of its high quality visuals, but is interesting for more than its flashy surface. You can jump into fights as one of four customizable classes, ranging from basic soldiers to medics. Unlike many free-to-play shooters, you’re not limited to only fighting against other players in PvP arenas – you can battle in co-operative missions against computer controlled opponents as well.

These missions are made available by Crytek on a regular basis, encouraging you to check back each day to see if new missions are available, similar to daily quests in MMOs. When you launch into a mission, you and your friends move through combat spaces and gun down enemies on the way to complete an objective – reach an extraction point, defend a structure or fight for your life while waiting for rescue. These objectives are strung together seamlessly to create longer missions. So in a mission’s first segment you might fight across a bridge to reach a helicopter, then ride the helicopter to reach the next segment with no loading screen. Crytek mixes and matches these segments to create new missions, and adds new segments in over time to keep the experience varied.

While on the ground, you’ll find many familiar Crytek-like shooter mechanics. Hitting C brings up a customization menu for your gun like in Crysis, where you can swap around attachments, like adding a red dot sight to your assault rifle. You can sprint around, slide at high speed to duck under incoming fire or stagger enemies, and vault over low bits of cover to reach new areas. Because it’s a multiplayer experience, you’ll also find some places around the maps allow you to perform co-operative actions. Two players can team up to boost over high walls, for instance, giving access to otherwise blocked off areas, which may open up better ways to attack your enemies.

Enemies in these PvE missions seem to be fairly intelligent and put up a pretty good fight, and vary in types from standard gun-toting humans to larger mechanized types. You’ll need to use teamwork to take down the bigger foes, as some will have weak points on their back, meaning it’s best if one player draws their attention while another swoops in behind to deal damage. In many ways, it feels just like playing a section from a full-priced shooter’s campaign, except it’s free and there's no real character development or significant story.

Player versus player modes will also be included, which range from standard deathmatch and bomb defuse scenarios to more specialized modes involving territorial capture. To enhance your performance, you’ll be able to equip special items like silent shoes that muffle your footsteps, boots that allow you to pass by claymore mines without triggering them, and other items to lengthen sprint times. Crytek wants to be careful, though, to make sure that acquiring these types of items isn’t a matter simply handing over money to get instant bonuses. They do not want this to be a pay to win title, and are still in the process of fine tuning exactly how the microtransaction system will work for US and European territories (Warface is already live in China and Russia). In general terms, Crytek’s goal is to only enable real-money transactions for things like cosmetic items and ways to boost experience gain.

With really impressive visuals, fun gameplay and, at least according to Crytek, the ability to run smoothly on machines with five year old hardware, Warface is another promising free-to-play title, and yet another reason paying 50 to 60 USD for a quality shooter experience seems more and more like a waste. For now, Warface does not have a North American launch date.



Source : ign[dot]com