HEROES & GENERALS (2016) REVIEW

A bad, budget Battlefield clone.

PC exclusive.

Heroes & Generals is a first person shooter published and developed by Reto-Moto for the PC.

GAMEPLAY
Pretty much pay to win, different guns, vehicles, tanks, planes, anything you either need to grind for hours for, or buy with money. This wouldn't be a huge problem if they allowed new players to use more than one gun, the starting one will be a semi-automatic rifle, useless at close range against machine guns and also useless at long range against the snipers which can one shot you from ages away by hitting anywhere on your body, yes, that's really a thing, and plenty of these weapons will probably have been brought, rather than earned.

If you're finding them annoying, then the only way to really beat them is by joining them and buying guns too, or by doing the online equivalent of bashing your head against a brick wall and eventually being able to earn another gun. The fact that you can't even chose between a few different guns at the start of the game, in case you don't like semi-automatic rifles, is really the problem. The game seems to be designed to push you towards buying more guns, rather than at least having the ability to change to something that might suit you more, or at least give you a bit more variety in your approach.

So it seems being infantry isn't working out for you, so why not switch into a tank, or a plane? Well to do that you have to continue to grind for hours and hours, or buy it with your real money. You could always drive a car, or join someone in one, although don't expect to be able to use your weapons inside vehicles, because that would simply be too dangerous.

If you want to switch sides between the Americans, Germans and Soviets, you'll have to pay to do that, and if you want to customise your different soldiers for each side, you'll have to pay for that, and for more load out slots. You even have to pay to change any of your soldiers names.

You can't change your load out while battles are in progress, meaning that if no one on your team has selected to play as a tank driver, good luck being able to stop your enemies tanks, or even if you simply want to change between a machine gun and a sniper because no one is taking the enemy snipers out, you'll have wait till the end, at which point you probably won't need to change.

The spawns are simply awful, allowing the other team to spawn camp and kill you without you really being able to do anything about it if you've been pushed back to your final point.

The spawn delay timer is a mindbogglingly stupid decision. You have these massive open maps that could fit hundreds of players in at once, but instead limit it to just below 20 most of the time, with players having to wait for other players on their team to die before they can rejoin the battle. I can't even begin to fathom how that's a good idea, unless the engine can't handle more people, which would be terrible when you consider the size of the maps.

Report system for griefing or hacking is pretty bad. There is no option to kick, only to give them a strike if they kill you. These people seldom seem to get banned though, so the likely hood of you finding more people like them certainly seems plausible. There are also numerous reports of players being banned because people simply complained about them en-mass, even though they had done no wrong, and them getting for people whining about them.

Three way battles are at least a nice idea. It would be nice if there were more factions though, the British, French or Italians should surely fit in somewhere, although for all we know the Americans may have conquered the whole of Western Europe, the Soviet Union the whole of the East, and Germany took Central Europe, the game never really explains why the Americans are fighting the Soviet Union.

GRAPHICS
The game isn't gritty enough for a WWII game, when I play games like Call of Duty: World at War, I see limbs flying everywhere, people crying desperately, ruined cities, graves and even unwelcoming, dark music. In Heroes & Generals I spawn in and see a small countryside village and a few tanks around, it doesn't look or feel like a place locked in fierce battle like any WWII game should.

SOUND
You won't hear either side upset by the horrors of war or anything, sometimes characters don't even seem to scream when they get killed. The guns and other things sound alright, far from the brilliant effects you'd usually hear in franchises like Battlefield though.

There isn't really much of a soundtrack, there's some music at the main menu and some more plays towards the end of rounds, it's nothing special anyway.

VALUE FOR MONEY
It seems a bit odd to be doing this for a free-to-play game, however considering you need to spend money to even try and play this game on the same level as others, I think that justifies it. Quite frankly, if you want to enjoy the game you will need to spend money, or at least grind for hours with inferior load outs to other people, and if you don't enjoy the game you won't have to spend any money on it. If you have as much fun as I did playing it, hopefully you won't have to worry about spending anything.

OVERALL
I really can't justifying playing this game over other franchises in the genre such as Battlefield, or even Call of Duty, even the fact it's free isn't appealing once you realise why it is. The fact that this game came out of early access without any update or any kind of fan fair, but just decided to slip out one day suggests that not even the developers thought it was worth promoting. The only redeeming factor to this game is the fun you can have messing around with friends in it, otherwise you should avoid this game.