Samrat Sharma

Meet Aldo Raine. In a fan boy-ish turn of events, this is what I have ended up calling my Battlefield Heroes character. I’ve been playing a lot of DICE’s Battlefield Heroes beta lately – and it’s great.

The game is fun, the shooting and the movements are top notch – as is to be expected from the guys who did the original Battlefield.

What is also great is that the pairing is not Axis versus Allies, but a fictional setting – pitting the Royal Army against the National Army, which lets you choose the ‘evil’ side without being genocidal racists. This has its own advantages – you end up on servers with people of varying skill and propensities beating the crap out of each other.

The cartoony look also lends itself to a lot of character customisation – which genuinely makes the game more enjoyable as you gun it out against a horde of ragged mercenaries and pirates and sailors in a colourful world. Not to spoil it further, but there is a huge array of weapons and abilities that can be activated by mapping each to numbers 0 through 9 on your keyboard. Each class – the rugged soldier, the heavy-like gunner and the stealth based commando – gets its own set of abilities that are a huge throwback to Saturday morning cartoons.

People have asked if this is similar to Team Fortress 2 – and I happy to report that it isn’t. TF2 remains a hardcore, gory shooter with a distinct art style. The art style here is superficially similar, but has a more wholesome G rated George Sidney feel to it. If that means anything to ya.

I expect to spend a lot more time in this game.