First Impressions: Warface Beta

 Just spent some time with the Warface beta for Xbox 360 and surprisingly had a good time with it. I'm not saying that its going to replace Call of Duty, but for a game in active development it wasn't too bad. The game has a very simple look and feel, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. You can tell its borrowing from some of the more popular franchises out there, most notably Ghost Recon and the above mentioned COD.

The games setting is standard fare for the genre,  with abandoned foreign villages and middle eastern deserts. The game's. Sound is also rather generic and is what you'd expect from a 360 arcade game.

Now i know it sounds like I'm being extremely hard on this game, but really I'm not. The game is a free-to-play fps, you downloadable from Xbox Live. I was never expecting Battlefield 4. Games of this type have two objectives; to get you to put tons of hours into them, and to get you to spend money through in game purchases. And this is where this game may succeed.

Gameplay from Call of...I mean Battle...I mean Warface.

Its paint by numbers approach may be its greatest strength, because even though it doesn't do anything new, it does most everything well. The game controls ok, and is easy to pick up and play.

When you shoot the opposition they normally take damage, which is always good in a fps. Seriously though, it controls well enough and takes obvious cues from some of the more popular franchises. One major gripe is that all of the enemies look and react the same. After playing through a few levels of co-op this stood out like a sore thumb. The jury is still out on the multi-player, and I'll update this as soon as the full game is released. So far though the game seems to be decent, but not much more than a time waster. Its fun to play, but to get the most out of it, it appears you'll have to be willing to put up some cash for weapon upgrades and such.