I never played Battlefield 1942, and to this day the appeal of the Wake Island map evades me. But I loved Battlefield 2. Played the hell out of it. Sure, it was always a little flawed—OK, a lot flawed, because good pilots could completely ruin the game for everyone else—but the wide range of classes, the mix of vehicles, the squad-based play, and the whole commander dynamic made it a great game.

So when I found out that EA was going to make a free-to-play version of that classic game, Battlefield Play4Free, I was immediately intrigued. The promise of the new game is simple: the maps and vehicles of Battlefield 2, combined with the zero entry fee and micropayments of Battlefield Heroes. I signed up for, and got into, the closed pre-beta, and a couple of days ago the beta opened up. Now anyone can play.

I wish I'd never bothered. The game is wall-to-wall horrible. The gameplay mechanics are broken, the game itself is aggravatingly buggy, and the micropayment model is an egregious and blatant cash-grab.

Play4Free

Battlefield Play4Free is a class-based, multiplayer-only first person shooter, with conquest-style, hold-the-checkpoints-to-earn-points gameplay. It's simpler than Battlefield 2, with neither squads nor a commander. Instead, the game automatically spawns you close to the action.

Two kinds of resources are earned through playing the game; XP, which governs your rank, and credits, which are used to temporarily unlock extra weapons. A third resource, Battlefunds, needs to be bought with real money (at a rate of one US dollar to 140 Battlefunds), and can't be earned in-game. Each time you get enough XP to rank up, you also earn a training point; these are used to selectively unlock additional capabilities such as hand grenades, extra ammo, faster sprinting, and so on.

Graphically, the game looks decidedly dated. This is likely a result of the relatively small size. The beta weighs in at only about a gigabyte, and so texture quality and model complexity have been scaled back. It's functional, but nowhere near as pretty as, say, Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

The flip side is that even on relatively weak hardware—I played on a Core 2 Duo E6700 with a ATI 4830 video card—the frame rates are high enough to be irrelevant. Battlefield Play4Free has very light hardware requirements, and should run well on any half-decent Windows PC.

The weapons feel satisfying, hitting hard and with good precision. Movement is smooth, fluid, and reasonably quick. I've never been proficient at flying Battlefield vehicles; whether using mouse and keyboard or my Xbox 360 controller, I'm basically awful. This is just as true in BFP4F as its predecessors, but judging by the way other people can wreak havoc with them I'm sure the controls all work well enough if you're competent at flying.

The training points are a good system. Training items are spit into two types; combat training, which improves your soldier's strength and awareness, and equipment training, which improves his weaponry. Some of the training items are a little surprising—the abilities to fly planes and helicopters both need to be unlocked, for example, as do hand grenades—but it provides a strong incentive to keep playing. The full unlock trees aren't available yet, so it's hard to know exactly how long it will take to get every item, but it looks like there will be plenty of things to play for if you're of a completionist bent.

I realize it's still labeled "beta," but this game is buggy as hell. If you're playing it in windowed mode, it doesn't trap the mouse properly. Try to turn too fast and the mouse will fall off the edge of the window, relinquishing control of the game. Full-screen mode solves that issue, but the game won't actually stick properly in full-screen mode. It'll randomly minimize the window, returning you to the desktop. Other times, it just gave up the ghost completely; it reverted to windowed mode, but stopped actually drawing the window contents, leaving just a dumb window frame. The game is still running normally, but it just leaves you completely blind. Attempts to rebind keys repeatedly crashed the game.

Many users, myself included, are also seeing a bug when using the best graphics setting. Aiming down the iron sights causes the entire screen to go blurry. The game is supposed to do some kind of depth-of-field effect, but instead of making the gun blurry, everything goes blurry.

There are other annoyances which might not be bugs, but are still downright annoying. For example, the game has no qualms about spawning you within an enemy's crosshairs. Several times I saw people camping in secluded spots adjacent to spawn points, so that they could instantly kill anyone spawning in front of them. Given the minimal control over spawning that the game has (you can only choose to spawn at your main base or at a random flag), this is unacceptable. Spawning should be safe.

Beta or not, these are not bugs that EA should have released into the world. I've used lots of beta software over the years; none has been this rudimentary or unfinished.

Bugs are at least fixable. What I don't think EA will be able to fix, however, is the bad design decisions that plague the game.