It may be the tenth game in the Battlefield series, but this time around, things have had a major shake up. Battlefield Heroes gets a new business model, a new graphical style and a new character levelling system. Oh, and it's free.

On first glance, the most striking feature is the cartoony new look - clearly it has drawn inspiration from Team Fortress 2. Gone are the super-realistic visuals of its predecessors - and the demanding system requirements with them.

But let's get into the gameplay itself first. It plays like all the other Battlefield games, but it feels more like Battlefield 1942 than the later sequels. Many of the fun 'bugs' in the first Battlefield game have been turned into proper gameplay elements. With Heroes, being able to sit on the wing of a plane as it flies around the map is intentional, rather than just poor coding. Rockets and explosions can propel you to high positions, and vehicles have some crazy handling.

It seems the developers have taken all the quirky bits and pieces that players of Battlefield 1942 invented, and presented them back to us as innovation. I'm not sure whether as gamers we should be flattered or demanding royalties for this sort of thing, but nevertheless, the end result is fun. It is the Battlefield we all know, just leaning more towards the casual players than the hardcore fans.

Which brings me to an interesting point - the rise of the casual gamer. Many developers seem to have jumped on the concept that a lot of the key gaming demographic don't have the sort of time available that some modern games demand. The trend is emerging now of creating games for casual players. I had always regarded console games as casual games, but it would seem now the PC has a huge library of games that focus on instant gratification. PopCap Games spring to mind. However I'm sure I’ve just found another topic for blogging about, so before I digress too far...

Electronic Arts has certainly gone this way with Battlefield Heroes. The very game itself is web based, downloaded and installed via a web interface (with prerequisite EA buggy net coding, it only took six tries to install... but then it is beta code). It has low system requirements, and with its 'cute' graphical look and free-to-play approach it will appeal to a wide audience. Each map is limited to eight players per side, and rounds are a lot shorter than in the previous games.

It would be easy to pass this over as merely "Battlefield Lite", but there are a few new features here. Character development has been introduced. Again, there is a casual slant involved as levelling is easy and progressive - as long as you can shoot and hit things, you'll get levelling points. A complete kill is not necessary, and even lowering the enemy base flag for a few seconds will add to your experience totals. As you level, you unlock various things for your character. Exactly what hasn't been defined yet, because there's also the question of micropayments. Another feature provided is the ability to outfit your character, as lots of comical clothes can be acquired for you to parade about in-game. It does annoy me when things like this are touted as a significant feature, as it registers about 95% on my "couldn't-care-less-o-meter". But it's there.

The new business model (for EA at least; several games have been done this way before) is ‘free-to-play'. The game costs nothing to download, install or play, instead it will be funded by advertisements (not in-game, but on loading screens and on the web page interface) and micropayments. What hasn't been made clear is exactly what these micropayments will cover, be it weapons, clothes, vehicles, or perhaps servers to rent, or even new maps. Wait and see I guess.

Battlefield Heroes for me captures that fun, addictive gameplay that the early incarnations of the series had, before things got all serious and competitive with Battlefield 2. After wanting to strangle the web designer who decided you'd need to log in twice to the website, with two different log ins, and wishing a merciless hell on whoever coded the installer, there I was six hours later, still playing the beta. Which says a lot.

It's fun, it's casually playable, it's still Battlefield, and it's free. I hope EA has the infrastructure to run it. And I hope id and Quake Live have seen it coming.

Web based games? In my day it was Legend of the Red Dragon on the local BBS at 9.6 kbps. Of course, history never repeats. Honest.