August 19, 2012 10:24AM PDT
It’s time to throw your wallet into the garbage disposal as we run down the best, weirdest, and free-est F2P games from Gamescom 2012.
In case you hadn’t noticed, Free-to-Play games are a pretty big deal these days. And at a PC-focused show like Gamescom, they’re an especially big deal. Luckily for you, we’ve spent countless hours looking through the weirdest, craziest, and scariest games on display here at Gamescom to bring you the Gamescom Free-to-Play Award Showcase Spectacular!
Winner: War Thunder
From Gaijin Entertainment comes this WWII-based vehicular combat game where one half is a PVP MMO that has players filling the sky with dueling airplanes (and ground vehicles to follow in a later update) while the other half is a campaign that lets you reenact battles such as Peleliu, Guadalcanal, and more. Learn the ropes of aerial combat while taking part in some of history’s most memorable conflicts, and then start blasting rival planes from the sky when not decorating your plane with era-specific pinup girl decals.
Winner: District 187: Sin Streets
Distrct 187 is a scary vision of urban crime in America. In this first-person shooter, crime is so prevalent that street gangs and police SWAT teams are locked in a perpetual turf war, stealing money away from each other in game modes like Bank Heist and outfitting their weaponry with increasingly deadly attachments as they work up through a CoD-like leveling system. Clearly, no citizen is safe. But it’s probably their own fault for moving to a place called District 187 to begin with.
Winner: Star Conflict
Also from Gaijin Entertainment is this space combat MMO about a future where man has discovered the treasures of an ancient civilization in a distant galaxy. And subsequently, as mankind so often does, we all just end up fighting over it. In this case, though, that fighting is done using powerful space ships that you can upgrade through absurdly detailed tech trees. So, on second thought, maybe we should find ancient treasure on mars.
Above: Star Conflict (left), Defiance (right)
Winner: Defiance
Trion Worlds and Syfy have pooled their resources to create a post-apocalyptic world that spans both television and video game. The aim for this union is to have both sides influence each other in interesting ways. For example, a character in the game may steal an important item from the player only to have that item pop up again in the show. Or a character in the show may digitize themselves into the game, where they are then spawn camped and the whole operation is brought to a screeching halt.
Winner: Bullet Run
In the near future of the Bullet Run universe, a revolutionary new “Synth” technology lets people reincarnate themselves into new bodies upon death. This groundbreak, scientific achievement–which skirts the edges of divinity–is put to nobel use fueling the latest reality TV craze: Bullet Run. Just imagine Big Brother, but with a lot more guns and lot less…everything else. Here, the goal is not only to win, but to hype up the crowd with fancy kills and strategically deployed taunts. Plus, you can play right now.
Winner: Silent Service
Ubisoft’s stable of free to play, browser based games includes the hardcore submarine sim, Silent Hunter Online. Life on a submarine is anything but riveting, and to Silent Hunter’s credit, it manages to reflect that sentiment quite well. Of course, once a dozen or so friends join in, one on one naval battles quickly scale to epic, explosive exchanges of torpedoes. As the captain of your vessel, it’s imperative that you manage your crew efficiently and pay close attention to the numerous gauges and displays surrounding the periscope. Should you fail in your mission, you may find yourself in a steel casket on the bottom of the ocean, before you know it.
Winner: Anno Online
Ubisoft’s city building sim gets its first multiplayer release in the form of a browser based, Flash 11 game, but there is little sacrificed in the way of scale, or detail, in the transition. Friends can work together to create gigantic empires that are indistinguishable from those found in the retail releases, and if you wish to speed things up, a tiny donation to Ubisoft will help speed things up. With the help of hundreds, if not thousands of other players, your civilization has the potential to grow to a massive scale through cooperative efforts and trade, rivaling the enormity of empires found in other games in the Anno series, if not the entire world building genre.