Heroes & Generals and its promo videos or descriptions promises great war show where each player has his own role and all must cooperate to achieve the goals. With the combination of strategy and action the player will feel like in the real war. Well, we had to try it even when the game is only in the Early Access. If you don’t know what Early Access is then you should know that the game isn’t finished and it’s not in Open Beta as well. The authors give you chance to buy the game, this one is F2P, but with warning that the game isn’t some finished or stable version as we know in betas. So this is not a review but mostly feelings about the game. And they are very mixed.

Heroes & Generals make you a carrier man in the army and you can choose from allies or German troops. Begin as normal trooper but you can progress to a vehicle driver, tank commander, pilot, paratrooper or sharpshooter. Therefore you need to fight in many battles to gain experience, money and weapons. This is one fine idea and when you see the skill tree and progression you are really motivated to continue and fight.

When you want to get battling you can choose from a random mission or take part in selected battles, there are European battlefields as well but you must fulfill some criterions. All is about capturing checkpoints, getting capture points, defending positions and other similar stuff. It’s not about frags or killing sprees, the authors really want you to cooperate and the right tactics win the fights. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

But this changes because Heroes & Generals has a problem…. many problems. The first is that you don’t really know if you are playing MMOFPS, World of Tanks or War thunder because Heroes & Generals wants to be all these games. And this is not right, if I want to play with tanks or planes I wouldn’t choose this game. When you reach tanks or planes there is a small surprise how much arcade the game is. What’s worse, the allies are in huge disadvantage, they have weaker tanks and planes are just rubbish. The dogfights last like 10 minutes because you just cannot get behind the German planes. Spamming tanks happen as well and this can turn into ridiculous moments when 12 of 16 players have armor and you are just waiting and counting seconds to get hit as a trooper. Yes, matchmaking doesn’t really work here.

But let’s return to the more pleasant things. The battlefields are huge and split into several sectors, they offer various places and terrains (villages, citites, hills, fields) and for an army consisting of different parts promise tactics. The mistake is that the maximum number of players I bumped into was 20 versus 20 and this fact turns maps of several square kilometers into nonfunctional idea. What mostly happens is that all the players gather on one place where the action happens. If you feel in outflanking or capturing defenseless place you have to do it alone because nobody joins you.

Bugs are problem as well, actually it’s a huge problem. One of the most common is riding the bike and when you want to stop and continue on fee you are just thrown into the air and die. And this happens really often. The game is arcade but bugs turn it into an arcade of arcades. Some more stuff? The game is P2W, some of the best pieces of equipment can be bought only for real money. The maps are just too often covered in fog (impossible to fly), the game doesn’t look as promissed and some battles last for hour, too long.

Heroes & Generals cannot be rated and should be placed into alpha or Closed Beta version to be tested more. I feel like that the authors moved it into Early Access too soon, there just too much work to be done, the game needs balancing, debugging and listen to the players. We are going to follow the game until it gets official release to make a review but I’m afraid we have to wait long time.