Can the free-to-play first-person shooter dominate the world?

Aug 21, 2013 19:34 GMT  ·  By

Crytek is trying to show that it can do more than just make Crysis games or perfect its impressive CryEngine technology and, with Warface, it's continuing to back up the praise it gave to free-to-play games.

Warface is already extremely popular in territories like Russia and Crytek is now organizing a special beta stage for its online first-person shooter for Western territories of Europe and the rest of the world.

At Gamescom 2013, the German company organized a very special booth filled with military personel who were drafting players into the Warface service.

PC demo stations were arranged and players could engage in a pretty traditional team deathmatch online.

While the action in Warface is pretty generic, as you just explore the map, shoot at the other team, and try to survive as much as possible, once again Crytek's impressive attention to visual details shows, as the map and even the animations and effects of characters are nothing short of stunning.

From bits of dust and smoke, to torn pieces of paper, there are also lots of PhysX effects, thanks to Nvidia's proprietary technology.

Weapons are quite standard, from assault rifles, to sniper ones, shotguns, or sub-machine guns. You also have different grenades, from regular explosive ones, to flashbangs or smoke bombs.

Kills are rewarded with points and keeping a streak going makes the total increase exponentially. It's still unclear what you'll do with the points, either in the match or in the overall game, but Crytek is expected to share a few more details in the future.

What makes Warface stand out besides other first-person shooters, besides its free-to-play nature, is the fact that players can really benefit from working together, not only by complementing their cateogies, Rifleman, Sniper, Engineer, or Medic, but also by helping each other reach different areas of the map, like higher ledges.

Warface is set to open up its beta stage in the near future, so look forward to testing it out soon enough on PC.