The current MMOG landscape is monopolized by orcs-and-wizards RPGs, so when a developer comes up with something outside that mold I'm always excited. Battleswarm: Field of Honor, a hybrid multiplayer FPS/RTS being developed in part by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell through Reality Gap, started its open beta on Tuesday. You need keys to get into the action, but they're available through Fileplanet (it seems like all open betas are starting there these days!) and MMOG website Massively also has 5000 keys to give away.
As I said, it's a hybrid game, which is pretty innovative. Gameplay is split between two forces, either humans or alien "bugs". If you want the FPS experience, play on the human side; joining the Bugs gives you an isometric overhead RTS view of the gameworld, letting you throw your units against the human bases in all-out warfare. Battleswarm is a free-to-play title utilizing micro-transactions instead of the usual monthly subscription, which won't be everyone's cup of tea. You can improve your character, whether human or alien, through purchasing items on the store with your spacebucks; however it appears that all items are unlockable for free players as well, they are just time-limited and vanish after an hour or two. Upgrades improve your unit through better armor and weapons, and through additional units for the aliens to utilize when on a map.
Since this is an indie title the graphics themselves are not quite up to Crysis standards, but I thought they had a certain charm to them. I also had some concerns with polish and spelling/grammar in the UI– the latter was annoying enough that I initially assumed (combined with the micro-transaction element) that this was originally a title developed for the Asian market which had been ported to the West. Hopefully that will be taken care of before the game launches officially. I personally found the tutorial to be a complete waste of time and really not helpful at all; the game itself is surprisingly unintuitive, at least to me, and my first couple of missions on either side were pretty much teeth-gnawing frustration until I started figuring out what exactly I was supposed to do. Once I got a handle on things, however, the game itself was actually a lot of fun and pretty addicting.
Whether you're playing human or alien you can freely switch back and forth between the races before you select a mission, so you're never locked into a race for the duration of your character. Maps pit multiple human players against multiple aliens, and victory is obtained when the first side reaches a certain threshold of points or whomever is in the lead when the timer ends (which seemed to be a standard ten minutes in all the maps I played). The aliens can also achieve victory by overrunning the humans' base and destroying it, though it appears that it's simply a matter of surviving for the humans. Although it's billed as a hybrid-RTS, I felt the RTS gameplay was a bit limited. Typically when I think of such a game I picture Starcraft and base-building, where Battleswarm's implementation is mostly about unit management. Your "leader" unit on the alien side is pretty ineffectual, dying quickly but unlike the human side when you lose it, it's gone for the duration of the map– however I wasn't able to figure out what the point of the leader unit was, and the game continued fine without it, so it didn't seem to be a big loss. While it was fun to play on both sides, I definitely felt the human's gameplay was more immersive; it was very adrenaline-inducing to gun down a swarm of aliens through the scope of a snipe rifle. I hope that the alien side gets fleshed out further though, else it will negate the point of having two sides if no one will play. While I didn't encounter any bugs and lag seemed to be reasonable, there was definitely a difficult time finding other players and I was waiting around a lot between battles. Ideally this is because of the open beta aspect and it's something that will improve with launch.
Battleswarm reminded me in a lot of ways like Shattered Galaxy, another free-to-play MMOG with strategy elements. As a fan of the genre and one always looking for more innovation and choice among the World of Warcraft clones, I certainly hope the game pulls up a bit more sheen before going live– there's definitely a lot of potential for something unique there if they can get it together.
Screenshots:
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