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Home : Games : Previews : War Rock
Obviously it’s easy to simply compare War Rock to the popular shooters on which it’s based, but it somehow transcends both these games in terms of accessibility and good old fashioned fun.
So where’s the catch? How does War Rock’s developer intend to make money on a game that they’re giving away? Microtransactions, baby! The currency in the world of War Rock is the Dinar (that’s the old Iraqi unit of currency, boys and girls) and it takes a good amount of Dinar to outfit your soldiers with better weapons and such. Dinar is earned in-game by fragging opponents and capturing bases or successfully planting or defusing explosives. The game is in beta right now (with a planned February release) and that’s pretty much the only way to get Dinar for the time being. Once the game launches there are plans to sell Dinar for dollars (the proposed rates are not yet known). There will be a version of the game boxed for retail sale as well (it will apparently include a certain amount of Dinar) at launch, but War Rock will also remain free to play after the beta test is completed.
Each soldier class starts out with competent but fairly basic weapons. For the cost of a few hundred or a few thousand Dinar the player can purchase better weapons for use on a limited time basis. Want to replace the Colt sidearm with a Desert Eagle? It will cost so much Dinar to use that more powerful handgun for a few days. It will cost more to use it for a week; and more again to use it for a month. While on the surface this seems like a system designed to give players with deeper pockets a distinct advantage; this is not really the case. The weapons for purchase (or, more accurately, rental) are indeed “better” (more powerful, more stable, higher rate of fire, etc), but there is no reason a competent FPS player can’t get by just fine with the basic equipment. Also, the better a player is at the game, the more Dinar they will earn, so it’s entirely possible for a skilled player to play and enjoy War Rock without paying a cent - even after the official release.
While the game is still in beta testing it may be unfair to talk too much about technical issues –after all, the point of beta testing is to get these things brought to the attention of the development team and subsequently addressed – but there definitely are some issues that need to be worked out before the game is ready to launch. The graphics are surprisingly good for a game of this type, but there are some glitchy problems here and there, such as environment glitches (spots that offer the ability to hide inside some supposedly solid structures and blast any enemy that happens by while remaining unseen and all but invulnerable) that make it possible for the wily player to“cheat” without actually cheating (War Rock includes the PunkBuster anti-cheating system to prevent "hackers" as best as it can). This is an issue that plagues a lot of FPS titles, so it will be nice to see it nipped in the bud here, if it can be.
There are also some bizarre server lag problems that pop up from time to time (like players that seem impervious to bullets even when a weapon is emptied into their faces and system lag that will occasionally cause all the objects in your field of view to blend together into a sort of "arrow" centered on the focal point of your mouse cursor - very frustrating, but infrequent) that will hopefully be addressed, but overall the game runs pretty smoothly even at this early stage. The game is currently updating with a large patch to Beta 5, which includes a new Xmas map and a new game mode called Conquest.
I was also surprised at the lack of VOIP support in the game, but there are apparently plans to add it sometime soon.
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