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The visuals of the game were severely outdated.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
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