The Battlefield series has always been incredibly popular, but the casual gamer hasn’t really caught on. This, in part, is due to the learning curve. For example, I remember it taking me a good few hours to learn to fly a helicopter properly in Battlefield 2, and even then the slightest wrong movement could see me spinning (much to my teammates annoyance) to the ground. Secondly, PC FPS games have never been a big draw to the casual crowd as they seem to prefer the console market. EA are keen to capitalise on both the casual and free-to-play market (an area that is quickly gaining ground on the Internet) and, thankfully, have combined the two with the help of DICE.

Battlefield Heroes is a massively scaled down version of the Battlefield franchise, taking on a cartoon-style look that you could mistake for Team Fortress 2. The new look is directed at a casual and younger audience - because apparently shooting people is ok if it’s in a cartoon! While the game features yet another World War II setting the armies are entirely fictionalised, although it’s pretty obvious who their real world counterparts are. This may raise some concerns about depicting the Nazis in cartoon form but, hell, it’s not like it hasn’t been done before. Another reason for having this graphical style is to try and reduce the system requirements so as many people as possible can have a shot at the game.

The game itself is designed to place less emphasis on skill and strategy, areas that may have turned prospective Battlefield players off in the past. It does this by scaling down the game to a measly three classes; the stealthy Commando, the all-around Soldier and the heavy Gunner. This totally eliminates old integral classes like the Medic or Engineer, but the presence of abilities and power-ups negates the need for these anyway. These abilities will do anything from allowing you to suck grenades in and heal yourself, to throwing fifteen grenades at a time. In my opinion each individual player build still seems to encourage strategy, but I guess Battlefield needs to retain some degree of this as the ticket system still remains (each team has fifty and a death reduces the count by one) and, at heart, it’s still a competitive shooter. You’ll be happy to know that vehicles still remain, however, which are jeeps, planes and tanks.

Players will also have the ability to level up their characters (the maximum level isn’t set yet), so in this sense the game is a little like an MMO. Leveling up will give you access to move skills and abilities. You’ll also be able to use points to buy new clothing and weapons, although EA is implementing a micro transactions system to allow you to buy new things instead. This also means you can customise your characters with new clothing, although personally I wouldn’t pay for something like that.

One concern I have is that DICE says the emphasis is on skill yet gives players access to plenty of ‘buffs’ (abilities that strengthen the player to some degree) by leveling up. Any game that has a leveling system results in the higher level players being far more powerful than the lower level players. Does this mean that skill will only come into play when a play reaches the top level? Or is DICE going to segregate players of similar levels? It sounds great, and it will probably be pretty fun, but this concern just leaves me to believe that it won’t be much different from an MMO. In previous Battlefield games you had access to new weapons but the toughness of defeating another player was largely based on who was the more skillful of the two. It’s free though, so I guess I can’t complain too much.

Battlefield Heroes has been delayed until December/early 2009 but an open beta should be starting pretty soon, giving players full access to the game minus micro transactions.  The reason for the delay is continued work on social networking features, which we know are all the rage these days.