Battlefield Heroes spiritual successor Heroes of Valor is out in Early Access

With visuals closer to the original Fortnite than grittier games like Call of Duty or Battlefield, the new Heroes of Valor is a fresh third-person shooter. Coming from Fancy Cat Interactive, a Belgian indie game studio founded by two brothers who are former developers on Blazing Sails.

It's a competitive third-person shooter but at the same time it feels more on the casual side. Not just because of the more inviting style and bright colouring, but also the mechanics of it. The movement, shooting and health systems are all super-simple and basic, along with character abilities making it more of a class-based hero shooter with a WW2 theme wrapped around it.

There's an interesting battle scale to it as well with troopers on the ground, in vehicles and piloting aircraft. There's always a lot going on.

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I managed to speak to the developers about Linux, Proton and anti-cheat and here's what they said: "Anti-cheat will be made in-house, no third party anti cheat will be used. We tried to use EAC, but it's far too bloated and inefficient so we decided to slowly but surely increase the anti-cheat by just implementing our own techniques. A lot of the most blatant exploits and cheats have already been countered. With the game going paid and the use of our community banlist, cheaters will not have it particularly easy to practice their craft."

They told me before release that "The game already runs on Linux" and after being sent a preview key, I can confirm there were no problems loading it up and jumping into a match. It appears to work rather well with the latest Proton 9.0-4 overall. And so with that in mind, it's been added to our anti-cheat page.

Game Highlights (from their press email):

• Class-Based Mayhem: Choose from Trooper, Heavy, Recon, or Engineer. Each class brings unique weapons, abilities, and battlefield roles.
• All-Out Warfare: Infantry skirmishes, tank duels, aerial dogfights, and more. Switch roles and tactics on the fly across various warzones.
• Objective-Driven Combat: Just slaying the enemy won’t do. We need to achieve our goals in this war! Conquer those objectives, or your heroism will all be for nothing.
• Stylized Carnage: A stylised, character-driven visual style meets the grit of World War II. It’s warfare with flair and firepower.
• Smart Bots, Relentless Action: Fight alongside or against intelligent bots that flank, fly, and fight with real strategy.
• Fully Customizable Battles: Set match rules, bot difficulty, time of day, and map rotation. Solo, co-op, or chaos with friends.
• Hero Customization: Unlock outfits, weapon skins, emotes, and more to suit your soldier’s style.
• Easy to Jump In, Hard to Put Down: Accessible for new recruits. Deep enough for seasoned veterans. Now enlist already, soldier! What are you waiting for! At this rate we might just run out of enemies!

For the people that care I should note it does use one bit of generative AI with the main menu music being a "placeholder and will eventually be replaced by music from a real composer".

There was actually a game called Battlefield Heroes from EA that launched in 2009 which was shut down back in 2015. It was reasonably popular initially due to being free to play and running on lower-end systems. This is incredibly similar to it, to that point that it's basically a spiritual successor.

A mildly amusing shooter that isn't taxing on your brain or your hardware. The problem for me personally with this one, is that I just didn't find any part of it really hook me in like other games do. I'm a huge shooter fan but it feels like this wasn't made for me (which is fine!), I think sadly I'm just not the target audience for this specific style of shooter. Feels like it was made for a younger more casual shooter fan. The gunplay just felt far too arcade-like basic, but I will admit blowing people up in an aircraft was quite fun. I like the scale and style of it and a few small bits, just not the overall gameplay.

Currently it also requires an internet connection. The Steam page lists "Single-player" as a feature, but there is none. All games require you to "Host" it online, although you can stick a password on it and play with just bots. That's quite misleading though. They have said they do plan to add an offline mode but it's not there yet.

I think the best way I could explain this is that it's like a mini low-poly colourful Battlefield cut to the essentials with support for online play and bot matches. If that sounds like something you would enjoy, then it's one for you.