Warface is now freely available for play

Warface is now freely available for play

You may not agree with everything I've said in the past about female characters being depicted in Warface, but you won't have to worry about any of that in the North American and European releases, which landed today, as they don't have any of that booby nonsense in them - at least not in the base version.

The launch trailer is particularly brutal, showing some sort of capture-the-flag like mode, that doesn't end well for anyone playing - unless you happen to be the man in the suit at the end.

Watch the full thing at the bottom of this piece.

The whole trailer turns the concept of an online shooter into a chess game, showing how pieces are taken back and forth with abandon, but unlike other shooters perhaps, where queens and knights can slay people willy nilly and the pawns have to just get out of their way, in Warface, the smallest of players can make the biggest of differences.

The game is totally free to play, though you can kick in some real world money if you want to buy visual upgrades for your character. One such "upgrade" or option, depending on your point of view, is buyable female avatars. So if you want to play as a girl and stare at her ass - which is of course the only reason you would, right wannabe-alpha males? - then you can do so for a few bucks.

The interesting thing will now be whether this game can usurp the two big players in the genre: CoD and Battlefield. With both of those franchises coming out with new versions in short order, the next few weeks could be pretty interesting for Warface. Or embarrassingly quiet.