Yup, it’s another MMOFPS. You know the drill – join a team, pick one of the usual classes and head off to kill the other team and/or capture their bases. The concept is far from new, and with proven competitors like Counter-Strike: Source, the Battlefield series and other success stories, how can you make a new entry stand out?
In some ways, War Rock does bring some new ideas to the table. Unlike other games in the genre, you don’t pay a dime for the product. It’s a free download with no monthly subscription fees. But if you want more than the sorry plain-vanilla weapons, you have to pay for them. You don’t buy them outright; you rent them for a set number of days. During those days you can’t lose the weapons, but once your time is up you have to either pony up again or go back to the lower grade stuff.
Of course, a skilled player with basic weapons will still smoke a n00b with the best arsenal money can buy. But in a sniper-duel, or during more advanced team play, the accuracy and speed of the weaponry may play a larger role. Will these micro transactions be enough to make publisher K2 rich? Probably not, but it’s an interesting experiment for sure. And you certainly can’t beat the price.
So, let’s look at the game itself. There are three main game modes: close quarter, urban operations and battle group. The first is quick hit, minimal tactics on small maps played in rounds. While you can blow up a target using a bomb to win, most rounds tend to end through simple extermination; die, and you’re stuck observing until the next round starts.
Urban ops is a bit bigger with a couple bases to capture and vehicles sprinkled around, thus enabling some measure of strategy, whereas battle group is the big Kahuna with large maps containing several bases and a wide assortment of vehicles. Non-team players will get well acquainted with the respawn points, as you basically don’t stand a chance trying to go it alone.
The lineup of vehicles is pretty good. There are humvees, tanks, motorcycles, choppers, boats and much more to play with. I found all land-based vehicles to be pretty self-explanatory. Airborne units were a bit trickier, however, so you definitely want to practice takeoff and landing before jumping into a live game. Crashing into a building with a handful of teammates on board doesn’t exactly earn you any new friends.
Another problem is that some vehicles seem a bit unbalanced. A fully manned tank is all but unstoppable, while a boat is a sitting duck just asking for an RPG as it chugs along the shore. But then again, being a sitting duck isn’t that big of a deal since you receive no damage while in the vehicle.
That leads to some peculiar situations, like a jet screaming across the map a few feet off the ground all the way to an enemy base, engulfed in flames as it is peppered with bullets and grenades. But lo and behold, the pilot simply exits out of the burning wreck before the crash and is now able to hit the enemy team from the rear. Realism/arcade mode is always a fine balance, but in this case I’d like to see a little more emphasis on the former.
On the bright side, the graphics aren’t half bad. The minimum specs are forgiving, so I was surprised to see the level of detail they managed to cram in there. None of the maps really stood out from a design standpoint, but there’s enough variety in each map to keep all classes busy. Some of the close quarter maps had a couple “too good” spots for snipers, where it’s hard to lob a grenade just right to take them out, however.
The sound is rather blah. There’s nothing really wrong with it, it’s just generally under whelming. When you fire a heavy machine gun in other games, you get a satisfying roar that feels somewhat real. In War Rock, it’s like getting a growl from a Chihuahua.
Speaking of shortfalls, let’s grab the bull by horns and get the complaints out of the way. Now, since the game is still in Beta there’s still a chance the vehicle balancing issues will be resolved. I also hope they rethink the key-mapping issue. As in, make it possible at all rather than the current fixed setup. BF received plenty of flak over this so I’m surprised these guys don’t make it a given.
There is a fair deal of clipping, especially in the observer mode where you can jump between surviving teammates, and I once saw a humvee make a wildly unrealistic jump up on top of a bridge span. More Beta bugs? If so, I certainly hope they fix it, and while they’re at it, I also hope they include a squad-feature for the final release.
There’s nothing really new here from a gameplay perspective. But since this is a rather blatant mashup of CS/BF features, anyone who likes either series may find some much-needed variety in War Rock. Sure, it’s more of the same, but at least you have plenty of new maps to explore and an ample supply of n00bs for target practice.
Personally, I found myself gravitating towards the close quarter mode. It’s quick in-and-out games, where each of the 7-9 rounds often ends in less than two minutes, and there’s little commitment beyond the immediate game. War Rock doesn’t inspire the kind of long-term dedication you see in other MMOs, but it’s more of a weekend thing where you suddenly say, “Hey, I haven’t played that game in a while. Let’s rent some bad-ass guns for a couple days and clean up!”
For that purpose, War Rock gets the job done. And when you grow bored, just leave it alone until next time you’re looking for some action-filled variation.
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