BattleCry Trailer Spouts Blood, Alt-History

I'm pretty sure I knew of BattleCry before today, but its maximo-genericus name got me confused with Warcry, Battlefield and, of course, Game of War: Fire Age. It's a free-to-player third-person Team Fortress 2-'em-up, replacing the cartoon whimsy of Valve's game with decapitations and, um, Cossacks. Set in an alternate timeline where a world war at the end of the 19th century put a ban on gunpowder and conflict, it's about elite teams of soldiers sent into "WarZones" to settle disputes. The imaginatively named BattleCry Studios have just put out the first in-game trailer, which you can see below.

I do rather like the look of the Enforcer class, given the barest bit of detail over on the official website. There's a total of five "warriors" being shown off at the moment which seem to fall into various recognisable tropes - stealthy stabs, long range arrows, mechanic and so on. There's also some cause to hope for the game's setting, given that it's designed by Viktor Antonov, he behind the worlds of both Half-Life 2 and Dishonored.

There's other information scattered about the BattleCry site, such as on the main page where it's revealed there'll be more factions added as time goes on. The introduction post by new community manager Shanin Kanafchian, previously of CCP, also mentions they're looking into developing various "community-orientated features." This includes a method by which players can assist each other with bugs, though they're still working out exactly how they want that to work.

As with most current F2P games, BattleCry is soft-launching in beta, currently planned for 2015.