EA has often been maligned as a company averse to experimentation, but if its recent press day for the new EA Games brand was anything to go by then this is becoming an increasingly unfair criticism, if only in respect of the way it handles its customers’ money. While Battlefield Heroes champions a free-to-play scheme for the team shooter genre, sustaining itself through a mixture of ad support and purchasable items, Battleforge attempts a similar thing for the RTS, blending in elements of trading-card pursuits.

A PC multiplayer game, Battleforge splits its offering between co-op and player-versus-player. Cards are dragged from your deck on to the battlefield in order to summon units – different colored cards representing units of differing defensive or offensive types. Cards can either be purchased through microtransactions or won from certain campaign objectives – kill a particularly powerful enemy and it will be added to your deck.

While the nondescript fantasy stodge of its world doesn’t really grab you by the throat, the focus on co-op offers second-to-second gameplay that could potentially set it apart. The campaign is fought against an AI governed by heavy scripting rather than one that dynamically mimics the strategy of a human player – but while the solutions to the co-op challenges were very limited in the demonstration, the developers assured us that the game would allow players to come up with their own solutions to challenges. It’s difficult to see how it couldn’t end up demanding a more freeform approach given that players’ decks will vary widely, with 200 possible card types to choose from.

While RTS fans might baulk at the idea of paying for each unit, it’s something familiar to the world of trading cards – the mixing of the two is a canny way of framing micropayments in the context of something already well accepted. Even if the game fails to capture interest, that alone makes it something worth watching.

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