Heroes and
Generals is sometimes being described as a mix of Planetside and Battlefield. It
was a FPS set in a WW2 scenario with huge battlefields and a strategic world
map, similar to Planetside. The comparisons therefore don't seem too far
fetched.
You should
however not expect gunplay in the same quality as in Planetside or the
Battlefield games. It was not as smooth as in a polished AAA game. Nonetheless,
the HnG movement and gunplay overall felt pretty decent.
Heroes and
Generals had with Germany, the USA and the Soviet Union 3 factions fighting
against each other to achieve world dominance. This is obviously not historically
accurate, since the Soviets and Americans were allies in WW2, but was probably
chosen to use a 3 realm concept, similar to games like Planetside 1/2, Dark Age
of Camelot and so on.
With 'Assault'
and 'Capture and Hold' there were essentially two different game modes with a
couple of variants, which included infantry only battles or battles with tanks
and planes. In Assault one team was defending 3 objectives against an attacking
team, while in Capture and Hold both teams were fighting over control of 3
neutral objectives. The game modes therefore played quite similarly. The
highlight however was certainly the War mode, in which all 3 factions were
fighting over control of Europe and there were essentially hundreds of different
battles being fought on giant Europe map. The battles themselves however were
still Assault or Capture and Hold matches, with the difference, that they were
contributing to a bigger goal. This scope of a global conflict was great and
certainly the high point of the game.
The visuals
of the game were severely outdated. Heroes and Generals officially released in
2016, the same year Battlefield 1 released. BF1 certainly had a much bigger
budget, but Heroes and Generals essentially didn't look any better than
Battlefield 2 from 2005. Even for a studio, that isn't one of the top dogs,
that is a bit weak. The reason for this was probably that HnG was created with
the relatively old Retox engine, which was apparently hard to modify and
improve.
Part of the
popularity of the game was probably its hilarious physics engine, which
provided many funny compilation videos of Glitches and crazy moments, that I
can only recommend to watch.
The player
numbers for Heroes and Generals were actually quite respectable. For the
longest time they remained somewhat constant between 3000 and 5000, which seems
totally okay for a lesser known game. Only after the announcement of the server
shutdown on the 25th of May 2023 and the controversies around a potential
Heroes and Generals 2, have the player numbers significantly fallen. HnG 2 was
supposed to be financed via Kickstarter, but that campaign turned into a
disaster. The developers were trying to gather 3 million Dollars, which was
ludicrously ambitious, in order to make a successor game with the Unreal 5
engine. The campaign wasn't going well and so the developers tried to save it
with a Twitch Stream, in which they told players that they didn't need to worry
if they don't reach their Kickstarter goal. The game would get financed anyhow.
This was obviously a pretty awful signal and lead to a massive backlash with
many people pulling back their initial pledges, since there was no reason to
donate hard earned private money in such a game/shady developer. I also don't
understand why the developers shutdown their first game so early, since it was
probably their biggest source of income, still had respectable player numbers
and the potential sequel is probably still years from release. Maybe they know
what they are doing, maybe not.
I haven't
mentioned the biggest problem with Heroes and Generals 1 yet, which is, like
with a lot of F2P games, the monetization scheme. Some people will call it
Pay-to-Win, other will call it heavy Pay-to-Convenience. Only one thing is
certain, they used a very aggressive monetization scheme, that reached nearly
every aspect of the game. I am personally a bit tired of people defending this
behaviour of the developers and calling it 0 % P2W, since you can technically
unlock everything via playing. That is only correct, if you mention, that you
will need to grind for hundreds of hours to unlock the same stuff other players
can get within minutes by using the power of their credit card. Every single
weapon, gadget, attachment and even level-ups for the weapons could be
purchased with real money. The grind to unlock these via the ingame currency
was massive. Even unlocking a single weapon would take dozens of hours and
there were many weapons in this game. There were also around a hundred
different XP Boosters for every single item in the game. In my opinion there
was no doubt, that this game was way overmonetized and developers/publishers
need to be called out and not defended for it. It is totally fine to point out,
that the game is still fun, despite this monetization issues and that plenty of
games are even worse. A grey perspective on the matter seems more appropriate
than a simple black and white approach. And I haven't even mentioned, that
tanks or planes for example also had to be unlocked with a grind and had huge
costs to maintain them, which could of course be nullified by paying money. Saying
that this was a fair battle, in which experienced and new players were fighting
with the same chances, just doesn't seem right to me.
Result:
Heroes and
Generals had a very cool concept as a WW2 game with a massive scale, in which
every battle could contribute to the outcome of the overall war. This was the
best aspect of the game and I totally understand why some people loved the
Battlefield meets Planetside approach. The gameplay was certainly not part of
the best in the genre, but surely serviceable. The visuals were disappointing
and the aggressive over-monetization pulled me away from the game. With a
better developer/publisher Heroes and Generals could have turned into one of
the best games in the WW2 genre, so it only ended up being somewhat good.
6.5/10
