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Battlecry Preview - PAX Aus 2014

Giving the team-based brawler a Battle-try

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You know, Bethesda, it's alright if you want to be Valve. Nobody will mind. You can be totally public about it and we'll all accept it. It's like admitting you want to be an astronaut; it's an admirable, if somewhat improbable, goal to aspire to. But you have to be open about it, alright? It's not right to dance around the issue like this. First you published Brink, technically comparable to Team Fortress 2 in the same sense that a Sega Saturn full of chicken giblets was technically comparable to the Playstation, then you roped in Viktor Antonov to design Dishonored's sleek, metallic, totalitarian, not-quite-steampunk-Combine regime, and now you're making Battlecry, your second attempt thus far at making Team Fortress 2, also with Viktor Antonov.

Battlecry game

Oh, that's not fair of me - Battlecry isn't so much an attempt at replicating TF2 as it is an attempt to replicate TF2's medieval mode, where thousands of people gather daily to be royally slaughtered by Demoknights. A free-to-play game in which two teams fight in objective-based matches using swords, shields, and improbable steampunk devices, with a dash of characterisation and distinctive visual design on top. It's in third-person this time, though, so when the hat economy inevitably coalesces into being you'll be able to admire your virtual head-mounted trophies even in the midst of conflict. Well of course; that much you should have been able to determine from the marketing material. But what's it like to play? Fear not: your dearest, most intrepid writer joined a queue, of all things, to find out.

So after being sat down in a darkened booth and forced to watch a video that was part instructional tape, part trailer and part subliminal conditioning, we were all ferried out into a player-versus-player match called Land Grab, so-called because you aggressively buy up properties in order to-- sorry, I mean 'because you capture areas'. With only a handful of players to a side, the map was a little quieter than I imagine it will be under the thirty-two player limit, but still sufficiently hectic around the points of conflict. A full server, I imagine, will be the video game equivalent of running around in a wind-tunnel full of discarded scrap metal. Of the planned five classes, three were available: the Tech Archer, the Enforcer and the Duellist, taking the roles of the sniper, the fighter and the sneaky backstabbing twit respectively. Each one has a set of three unique abilities and a fourth ability that lets them go ballistic for a few seconds – or in the case of the Duellist, turn invisible – once they've filled an arbitrary bar, along with a primary and secondary attack. And, erm, that's about it.

Battlecry game

I can't help but feel that if you're making a game set in a world where gunpowder has been literally banned – and your solution to global warfare is to decide everything based on the fights between two teams in not-Badwater-Basin – then you'd maybe want to add a pinch of extra subtlety to the melee combat beyond the usual 'mash, dodge, block' trinity, but unless they plan to dramatically change Battlecry then that's exactly what you're going to get. Every fight I encountered consisted almost entirely of people swinging wildly at whoever was wearing a different-coloured jacket to them – with the more perceptive ones holding up the Enforcer's shield, pulling out a special ability or dodging out of the way on occasion – and while you could easily present this as the fumble-fingered butchery of players who still have to glance down at the control scheme every now and then, it's fairly apparent that they had already pretty much explored the limit of what you can do when swords clash. Sure, the special abilities added a pinch of variety to things – the Enforcer's spinning attack, the Tech Archer's annoying little knockback – but they were ultimately just tassels on a somewhat underwhelmingly simple combat system. At first, I'd try to play it cleverly; striking from behind, dodging away, circling around and cloaking briefly to disorient people, but eventually I realised that you get equally successful results from just wading into a fight and hammering 'attack'. I guess it really is just like TF2's medieval mode, then. Hey-o.

One new-ish feature – at least, new in the sense that I can't think of a multiplayer game that has done it particularly well – is grapple points, which allow you get to high places and cross gaps in the terrain. Now this is where Battlecry could legitimately shine, because there are few sensations in video games quite as joyful as swinging everywhere on the end of a cable, letting go and leaping into the fight with a bowie knife clenched in your tee- oh, never mind. What actually happens is that you point at a grapple point, press a button, and then you just... go there. No momentum, no complexity. It's certainly nice of Battlecry to come up with a means of ascending to higher ground that doesn't involve the horrific, ubiquitous clumsiness of climbing video game ladders, but I can't help feeling that I've just watched another potentially interesting mechanic get boiled down to just clicking on a shiny thing.

Battlecry game

So maybe Battlecry is focusing on strategic gameplay over nuanced mechanics. That's a possibility, right? Coordination certainly seemed to be a key element; even throughout the course of our short match, players quickly learned the value of hanging around a zone to ambush any ambitious twerp who tried to get in a sneaky capture. Sticking together isn't quite as important as in, say, Counter-Strike - where wandering off on your own is about as advisable as diving into piranha-infested waters with several pounds of chipolatas stapled to your torso - but unless you want to spend half the match running away and being generally useless, it's still a good idea to tag along with the rest of your team. The idea of Land Grab was that the zones you needed to capture would randomly shift locations once they had been 'drained' of points, and while I like the idea of somebody trying this, it does make you wonder how suited some areas are to being the focus of the action. You can't just plant a flag in any old room and go “yep, that's a capture point”; you need to carefully ration out entry points, consider camping positions, ensure that it actually provides interesting combat situations. Furthermore, isn't this game-mode supposed to be symmetrical? Often the positions of the capture points would vastly favour one team over another, and while I'm sure that the dramatic comebacks they spawned gave the commentators plenty to gush about, I can't help but feel that events were being torn right out of our hands when our comfortable lead was shattered by one of the capture points being moved to the other side of the map. It's like trying to play football at the local park with an excitable stray dog chasing the ball: sure, it mixes things up and keeps people on their toes, but it's an unnecessarily disruptive element that throws a big nasty wrench into the works of anything remotely resembling a tactical plan.

So what I'm saying is that it doesn't look like Battlecry is going to be a particularly competitive game. And that's totally fine! I've had my shortcomings described in excruciating sweary detail by far too many basement-dwelling crustaceans to honestly care about competitive multiplayer any more. Battlecry could fill that niche; sit down with your mates, mash your teams together, talk about your day, laugh when people accidentally jump into the level-spanning chasm and don't give two hoots about which side actually comes out on top. It's certainly gratifying to jump into the fray and get chopping away, what with the accessible controls and the ease with which enemies get turned from living, breathing human beings into chunky beef soup, but once again we bump up against the problem that such a niche has more or less been filled by the gelatinous flabby free-to-play growth that Team Fortress 2 has become.

Battlecry game

Let's just disentangle ourselves from that uncomfortable sentiment, though, before somebody accuses me of sleeping with a framed photo of Robin Walker on my bedside table, and try to extract something conclusive from this. Battlecry isn't going to be a bad game, provided that the development studio doesn't get burned to the ground by a muscular bare-chested Australian businessman, but I just don't see it making a big splash. From what I gleaned from a single match, it'll probably be solid, dependable and reasonably well balanced – randomly relocating capture points aside – but when that single match ended and we all stood up, I realised that the prospect of going back and playing again was about as appealing as being offered a cheese and cardboard sandwich. I had seen everything I had wanted to, convinced that the game had nothing more to offer but the chance to experience the same thing again, perhaps on a different map or against different people. The idea of a team-based third-person brawler is still a pretty fresh one, and with a bit of extra depth here and there Battlecry could still live up to it in time for release, but right now it just feels like a patchwork quilt of mechanics we've all seen before, none of them standing out enough to excite, with a big orange Team Fortress 2 logo embroidered in the middle. I daresay the free-to-play elements will keep some people hooked – the in-game currency, iron, will almost certainly be the key to a world of cosmetic items that people can use to demonstrate their appalling lack of style – but if you're currently awaiting Battlecry's release with bated breath, I think you can probably afford to exhale. You'll damage your health doing that, you know.

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Battlecry
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Battlecry
4 images added Jun 16, 2014 20:37
Videos
Battlecry - PAX Australia Gameplay
Posted: Nov 4, 2014 14:49
Battlecry - E3 2015 Gameplay Trailer
Posted: Jun 17, 2015 03:23
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