New trailer shows how to play armchair general from your iPad.
Heroes and Generals, the strategic mass participation wargame from Danish developer Reto-Moto, has just hit beta, and there’s a new trailer to show off its shiny product. You too, the trailer promises, can fist-bump with the best of them when it all goes to hell in a handbasket – or ride a bicycle swiftly away from the carnage.
Everyone has their role to play in Heroes and Generals, from the guy with the gun to the tanker to the Commanders in their bunkers. You start as a grunt with a rifle, but by earning credits in the game you can buy more stuff, and eventually work your way to the top and becme a Commander. The ground troops do the heavy lifting, but the Commanders get to decide where resources are sent and who gets shelled this turn. Do well on the battlefield, and the outcome of the War is altered. That’s the real secret of Heroes and Generals for, unlike a scripted shooter, the result of one battle feeds directly into the situation you’ll face in the next, and could determine the outcome of the campaign as a whole.
Plus, you don’t need a PC to play it. Commanders can send in their instructions via any mobile device, and the game’s central servers do the rest. There’s even talk of a series of mini-games for the casual crowd, things like running a front line hospital putting the wounded back into play, or managing a factory that churns out planes and tanks for the front. Reto-Moto is aiming that level of play at the iPhone and Android brigade, but it does mean that you could, say, manage a hospital off-and-on during your working day, and after work get down-and-dirty in the trenches with the men you just healed as they try to assault yet another enemy bunker.
Mind you, if the Generals this game creates are as dotty as the bunch in the trailer, my sympathy’s with the soldiers on the front line. Were those Commanders cheering at getting their own plane shot down? Kinda looked that way to me.
No release date yet, but it is in beta, and when they do finally open up to the public it will be via digital download on their website.
