War Rock

Overall score:

An intriguing new trend in the world of online gaming is the “play for free, pay for upgrades” model, which appears on everything from Popcap to Puzzle Pirates to Shattered Galaxies. The idea is to offer you a full, playable game that you can download and play online for no charge, and then get you hooked enough to pay some money for bonus features—new costumes, new items, more privileges, and more content. You can play and enjoy the games without ever paying a cent, but if you want to access the full experience you need to pay. It’s a great system in many cases, sort of like a glorified demo. The newest entrant into this arena is a team-based shooter called War Rock, which really surprised me with the quality of its engine, graphics, and maps, and the options in its game types. It lacks some of the team features we’ve come to expect from games like Battlefield 2, but in most other respects it gives the world of PC shooters a run for its money.

The way it works is simple: you log in, choose a game (using a better interface than most other games of this type), and play. Based on your team’s performance you get a certain amount of money, given in Dinars, which you can save up and use to rent weapons from the armory—X amount of Dinars will give you an AK-47 for a few days, a week, or even a month. The basic weapons are always free, but the fancy ones require Dinars. The trick is, you can buy Dinars with real money, so if you don’t want to wait around to earn them in-game you can just whip out a credit card and get any weapon you want, whenever you want. The basic weapons are still pretty good, so you’re never forced to pay, but the option is there if you want it.

This model is especially interesting in a first-person shooter, because so much of the game is based on reflexes and skill rather than pure number crunching; if you don’t buy a membership in Puzzle Pirates you’re literally locked out of certain aspects of the game—including many puzzles that aren’t available to non-members at all—but if you don’t pay in War Rock you’re still just as capable as anyone else of playing and winning any battle. Your gun might not do as much damage, or fire as quickly, but if you can out-aim or out-think an opponent there is nothing in the game you can’t do. That’s saying a lot for a free game.

This would all be little more than an academic exercise if the game looked bad—crappy shooters, free or not, are never going to pull people away from good shooters. Amazingly, War Rock holds up in this category as well, with graphics and map design on par with the latest technology of any “real” shooter. The character models are crisp and move well, the textures scale perfectly to some pretty high resolutions, and the level design is excellent. In the middle of a heavy firefight on a huge map with dozens of players, all gorgeously rendered and moving fluidly, you’ll have trouble believing a game that good could possibly be free.

War Rock includes three different game types—game sizes, really—which will be familiar to fans of other games. The smallest is Close Combat, which mimics Counterstrike: you have a small map, smallish teams, and a specific goal (planting a bomb, etc.), and you don’t respawn when you die. It’s both fast-paced and strategic, and a lot of fun. Next is a game called Urban Ops, with larger maps and more players and a strong Battlefield vibe—you take and hold flags while trying to reduce the other team’s tickets to zero. The largest game type, called Battle Group, has the same basic idea, separated only by scale: the maps are bigger and can hold more players. Battle Group games also incorporate a lot of air power and a ton of vehicles, whereas most Urban Ops games have no air and a small handful of vehicles. Other shooters, such as Battlefield 2, incorporate this same idea of varying map sizes, but without the nifty War Rock option of filtering them out and choosing the one you want. In Battlefield you just join a server and hope they have map types you like; in War Rock you can choose what map type you want to play and then browse a list of available games.

One of the major faults of War Rock is the way it penalizes you for leaving a game early—if you exit out of a Close Combat map before it runs through the preset number of games, or if you leave the other types before one team’s tickets run out, you take a big hit in your Dinar. This makes it harder to schedule, because you can’t pop in and out of games the way you can with other shooters. There’s no “playing for ten minutes while waiting for your ride to show up” kind of thing—it’s all or nothing. I’ve even found that a phone call is too much of an interruption; instead of just sitting out one round of Close Combat to answer the phone, I’ll get back to my computer and find that I’ve been kicked for inactivity and given a big Dinar penalty. I’m not so busy that I’m constantly running away from my games, but I would at least like the freedom of knowing that I can play a game on my own schedule without devoting a massive chunk of uninterrupted time.

(Compound this with the fact that the game doesn’t have a good method of balancing out overwhelming wins. If one side of a battle controls all the flags except for your spawn, they can sit there and spawn camp you—literally shooting you right as you appear—for ten or twenty minutes, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t quit out, because you’ll take a penalty. Games like that should end more quickly instead of forcing you to play them out to the bitter, foregone conclusion.)

Where War Rock is really going to shine, in my opinion, is in LAN parties. It can be pretty hard to get a whole group of people running the same version of a game, especially if those people are not using their own computers and software. With War Rock, though, the process is a breeze—in fifteen minutes every person in the LAN can register an account, download the program, and get in a game. Any number of people can almost instantly be playing the same, stable, legal version of a top-tier online game, for free. How can you beat that?

Discuss it in our forums.

Written by Fellfrosch on March 16th, 2007