Developed by Crytek and originally released in 2013 for PC, Warface has been a longstanding free-to-play first-person shooter in the PC environment, especially with the international market. The game currently has 40 million registered users and broke a world record for most players on one server in 2013. In 2014, an Xbox 360 port was released, but was discontinued less than a year later. At that time the free-to-play market on consoles wasn’t quite where it is now. The current generation of consoles is where free-to-play really started to take off. Next month, Warface will be be coming to the PlayStation 4 (in Early Access, with a September release on both PS4 and Xbox One), a release five years in the making.
At a glance, it would be easy to write off Warface as a free-to-play Call of Duty clone. I’ll be the first to admit that I was skeptical going into it. Yes, it shares some similarities with Activision’s yearly shooter franchise, but doesn’t every first-person shooter" Warface does a number of things to really set itself apart from the competition, not the least of which is being completely free-to-play. At the core of Warface’s gameplay are four distinct classes and a focus on team play often not found in the usual “shoot the most people while dying the least” culture found in other shooters. It sits in a sweet spot right between the typical FPS and hero shooters that require a bit more team synergy.
Each of the four ...