[rwp-review id=”0″]
This game is in Open Beta and is subject to improvement
Difficult. Rage inducing. Adrenalin filled. Exhilarating. All this, in Open Beta.
Heroes & Generals is a gory and highly detailed game set during the difficult times of World War 2. It combines two overall game modes: the “Heroes” portion of the game which is First-Person-Shooter (FPS) based and the “Generals” portion of the game which is Real-Time-Strategy based. Both game modes heavily influence one another; the FPS battles are determined by the Generals usage of their assault teams and the overall aim of the RTS gamemode is to capture the enemy cities, which depends if players in the FPS mode win their battles. It’s player base consists of over 5 million users, with over 15 million characters created in total. And as stated above, the game is just in Open Beta.
I’ll be talking about the Heroes game mode since the Generals game mode is only available to more experienced players.
Combat in the Heroes game mode is ever changing; from fast paced action due to lightning attacks by an enemy light-tank squadron to slow, blood chilling moments where you hunt an enemy sniper through the scope of your rifle. This is the world of Heroes & Generals, this is the closest you can get to the six gruelling years that made World War 2.
The Theatre of War is split into thousands of individual maps and battles.
Players start off with choosing which war they want to take part in, which for now is the single choice of the European theatre of war (more theatres of war are promised to be added). After doing so, players will have to create a character based on one of the three factions: the Soviets, the Germans or the Americans. I accidentally didn’t change the name of mine, as a result I went into battle with the monicker “Khalid34ktt’s first rifleman”. Could be worse I guess. Choosing the American faction, my character started of with a M1 Garand, the starter gun for the American infantrymen, and a couple of MK II grenades. The first match I entered wasn’t so good statistically, dying twenty times and only taking one person to the grave with me didn’t make me feel especially good about myself. Despite my shortcomings, my team managed to carry me through the match and as a result, my first game in Heroes & Generals ended in victory!
The maps themselves are diverse, both in size and setting. One extremely large map is set in and around an airfield, with upto three of the factions fighting to capture and hold all three major control points. The capture-the-point system is linear, you can only decapture and then capture point A2 if you have captured point A1, resulting in your team following a corridor as you move from capture point to capture point. The major capture points as a result are uncapturable until you capture the capture points on the way towards them. Of course there are also instances where your team has two corridors leading to the central located major capture point, resulting in the enemy having to split its forces to deal with threats in either direction. The only downside to this is if the enemy successfully defends the major capture points and actually pushes out down the corridor of capture points the opposing attacking team is coming from, they may have a chance of shutting down that corridor. This leaves the attacking team with only half its troops, half the respawns and with a very grim outlook of the game.
The minimap lends another subtle dose of realism to the game.
The first-person gameplay itself is spectacular, though at times it was a bit jerky as the network tried to catch up. But first, how’s gameplay for the grunt, for the normal infantryman? The answer? Hard. I’m talking about ripping-your-hair-out levels of difficulty. The M1 Garand, though a favourite, is quite pitiful when matched against a player sporting a Light Machine Gun. Often in fights where quick reflexes would be enough to win a small fire fight, in Heroes & Generals multiple factors matter, but often the person with the better gun wins. And the infuriating part is, it’s accurate to history and all the more life like. After years of playing games I was lulled into a false sense of ease when it came to besting games. In Skyrim for instance, your horse could kill a dragon, next to that, I thought shooting some people would be easy. Heroes & Generals is a loud wake up call to how tough, competitive and unrealistically life-like a game can get. I found the easiest way to get kills or cause anyone bodily harm as an infantryman was to lob a grenade their way, and if that failed, to lob another. Lobbing a grenade at a “Panzer IV Ausf. H Specialist” and then having a 75 mm Sprenggranatpatrone 34 shot at me (blowing me into a million pieces) as retaliation quickly taught me that not only is throwing hand grenades at a tank ineffective, it’s down right stupid.
The harshest tests of evolution take place on the battlefield and unless you learn quickly, you’ll be left behind in the coldness of the earth. Heroes & Generals drills this lesson home, with the thankful exception that you have a pool of lives shared with your squad which you can use to respawn. This shared pool of lives is again decided by the aforementioned “Generals” part of the game.The amount of lives available depends upon how many assault teams the Generals have made available for your battle. A few more battles and I reached rank 2, a feat I was quite please considering my abysmal kills/deaths ratio.
40 hours in and I’m finally a Sergeant (rank 6)
The ranking system itself is pretty important to the FPS game, every rank has its own title attached to it, a rank 1 Hero is a Private 1st class and a rank 22 Hero (the highest rank) is a five-star General of the Army. This extra layer of detail isn’t merely added to make you feel better or to set you apart from other players, it also serves a vital purpose; every few ranks you unlock the ability to specialise your common infantryman into one of the other 4 available classes. They are, in order of unlocking: Tank Crewman, Fighter Pilot, Paratrooper and the Recon class. Here’s the tough part though, you have to choose which class you want to specialise in, once you have, you will be locked into that classes promotion tree and will only be able to unlock weapons meant for that class. In other words, don’t expect to go flying once you branch off into the Tank Crewman tree. If you dump real world money into the game, you can use gold bought with it to instantly buy a character of a certain rank, or to even buy a character that’s already a Tank Crewman or Fighter Pilot for instance. Real world money has it’s uses in the game which can prove useful, but not overly powerful compared to a normal player. Players can opt to be “Veterans” by paying money, unlocking an extra slot for another character, combat badges and more. The actual in game ramifications of dumping money on the game are very low, saving it from being a pay-to-win game.
The class that requires the lowest rank level is the Tank Crewman and as a result my adventures as a common infantryman came to an end when I reached rank five. It was time for me to forgo my M1 Garand and pick up the spade that came with the Tank Crewman. Also, I got a tank, an M2A2 light tank. Thus began my adventures of a roving, sometimes-confused-as-drunk-driving Tank Crewman. The M2A2 was the lesser of the light tanks, it did not feature a cannon and as a result it was ineffective against other tanks. What it did feature however were two machine gun turrets with 600 rounds of ammo apiece. As the driver and owner of the M2A2, I was relegated to the left turret and any willing character could hop on board and use the right turret. The slightly unfortunate design of the M2A2 however delegated that each Machine gun could only cover a 180 degrees of vision on which ever side it was placed. As a result, enemy anti-tank troops could easily approach me from my right side to avoid fire from my left-turret. The options were to either turn my tank to face them head on and so place them in the sights of my machine gun or to try and run away towards friendly troops. Being me, I chose a third option: Die while turning aimlessly in circles. Despite these setbacks, I quickly learned what any tanker from the previous era would have had drilled into them at tanker school: don’t advance without infantry support and always be on the move as a tank. A tank sitting still is a dead tank in the Heroes & Generals war book.
The M2A2 was an absolute beast of a tank, though I can’t say the same of my driving skills
Playing with a tank strapped to my back was the most fun I had in the game and though the M2A2 was the lesser of the light tanks and indeed the weakest tank for the Americans, it was the perfect tool for the novice tanker. There was nothing as pleasurable as mowing down a squad of infantry with your machine gun as they ran across a field. I used the M2A2 so much that I quickly upgraded the “M2A2 Light Tank Specialist” Ribbon associated with it.
The Ribbons overview helps you upgrade your equipment and keep track of the strengths of your character.
Ribbons are part of another ranking system in the game that do not improve your overall rank but rather allow you to upgrade weapons, troop carriers, tanks and planes. The Ribbon ranking system is a bit more demanding than the character ranking system since to upgrade the “M1 Garand Specialist” Ribbon for instance, you would have to constantly use an M1 Garand. This sort of system is akin to stories of how soldiers would grow fond of their preferred weapon, knowing it’s ins and outs so well as to easily combat someone with a superior weapon (so long as the person with the superior weapon hasn’t put a lot of time into using said weapon). The upgrades associated with the equipment are incredibly diverse and detailed, the M1 Garand has upgrades ranging from different bullets, sights, scoped sights, colour patterns, triggers, barrels and springs. Other than the colour patterns, each of the upgrades changes the way your gun could potentially be used. Equip a high caliber bullet, scoped sight, robust springs and a long barrel means you’ve effectively changed your M1 Garand into a decent sniper rifle.
The combat badges aid your particular play style by giving you boosts.
They also allow you to equip a “badge” (two if you’re a paying Veteran player) which, depending on the badge, allow you to customise your character’s abilities during battles. For instance, equipping the “Nimble” badge minimises the amount of noise your character makes when moving in game, proving incredibly useful when sneaking up on an unknowing sniper from behind or when crawling towards an enemy Panzer tank to place anti-tank mines around it. Badges themselves have three different levels: Bronze, Silver and Gold. Each level of badge gives a proportional added bonus to the effect associated with the badge. For instance while a Bronze “Grenadier” badge gives a +5% increased damage from explosives. the Gold version of the badge gives a +15% increased damage from explosives. Unlocking the different tiers of badges is tantamount to how often you indulge in the action that raises the Ribbon rank the badge is associated with.
As a result, with every few ranks of the M2A2 Ribbon unlocked different tools I could upgrade my tank with it. They ranged from a medical supply crate affixed to my tank to help infantrymen near me, to special rounds for my machine guns. As a result when I hit 5th grade of the M2A2 ribbon I quickly upgraded my normal default machine gun rounds to those of a higher caliber specifically designed to penetrate armor. This enabled me to penetrate the armor of light to medium tanks as well as troop carriers, making me a slightly more dangerous force on the battlefield. While picking of a truck full of ignorant infantrymen was easy, picking of tanks was far more difficult. The reason? Tanks (and indeed every other drivable vehicle in the game) have different thicknesses of armor all over it.
Upgrading my faithful M2A2.
For instance, The front of a tank has the thickest armor compared to the sides, back and bottom of the tank. If you’re thinking that’s easy enough and not too detailed, all I’d have to do is flank an enemy tank and riddle its behind with armor piercing machine gun rounds. Well you’re wrong. The armor thickness is detailed to the point where the lower part of a tank, regardless of which side, could be of a different thickness compared to the upper part of the tank. Furthermore, the armor plating of the turrets are often thicker than the main part of the tank (due to it attracting more shots than the main part of the tank). Even the mantlet (the door of the tank) has a different thickness. As a result, often it may be easier to place an anti tank mine near a tank due to its underbelly being very thin armor-wise, or to mark the tank and have a friendly fighter plane drop a bomb on it since the top of the tank is far more thicker than its front, sides or back. And even when you sneak up an enemy Panzer tank from behind with an M4A3 Sherman tank, it’s not an easy one hit kill as you think it would be. Often it’s a two hit kill and if you’re unlucky enough to miss or have the shot deflected (you have to hit an object with a low angle of incidence, a high angle of incidence will result in your bullets or cannon shots being bounced off the enemy tank) it could take a few more shots, which you may not have the opportunity to deliver.
All these factors make this game so realistic, so difficult and so exhilarating that I was lost in it for hours on end, capturing and defending points, navigating my tank around obstacles and down streets lined with mines and ultimately helping my team win a few games. I played with the M2A2 light tank so much that I upgraded my “Armor Assault” Ribbon to the 8th grade unlocking tanks such as the M5A1 Stuart light tank, the M24 Chaffee light tank, the M18 Hellcat tank destroyer and the M4A1 Sherman tank. Having saved up enough money I decided to forgo my M2A2 light tank and purchase the M4A1 Sherman Tank, a slightly toned down version of the M4A3E8 Sherman tank, but nonetheless an extremely efficient medium tank with a great history behind it. Due to having a medium tank I was subsequently placed in matches where there were other medium tanks as well, making sure I would still be experiencing challenging gameplay. Unfortunately, the costs of maintaining the Sherman was astonishing, I could barely break even after every match and luckily I didn’t dip into the red.
The tanks available to the Americans alone are a seizable force
My final words on Heroes & Generals? I wish I could dedicate more time to dive into the other aspects of the game such as the aerial combat, paratrooping and the recon class. If you’re looking for a realistic take on the World War 2 era of combat, you’d be hard put to find a more detailed and realistic game than this.
