New FPS game from ex Battlefield 3 designer might be exactly what hero shooters need right now

Battlefield 3 is the greatest online FPS game I have ever played. Yes, I sank hours into the original Modern Warfare 2, and there have been times, over the years, that my performance in Counter-Strike might have been called ‘adequate,’ but Operation Metro, Seine Crossing, and Damavand Peak will always feel like home, not to mention BF3’s criminally underrated campaign. Composed of former Battlefield, Helldivers, and Star Wars Battlefront designers, a new studio has just unveiled its first-ever game, a fresh take on the online FPS that, for now at least, looks like precisely the reinvention that the struggling hero shooter genre badly needs. It’s called Heart Electric.

Heart Electric is the debut work of Modoyo, a new studio that combines some of the strongest FPS game talent of the last 15 years. Directed by Niklas Fegraeus, whose previous credits include Battlefield 3 and its various expansions, Battlefield 4, Battlefield V, and the beloved Bad Company series, on the surface, Heart Electric is a hero shooter.

Now, it’s been a tough time for hero shooters lately. Overwatch 2 is still being roundly panned over on Steam, Apex Legends is struggling to keep its player count up, and Concord was completely pulled offline less than a month after launch. With Valve’s Deadlock bringing up the rear, and seemingly destined to monopolize what remains of the hero shooter player base, by some metrics, Heart Electric might face difficult circumstances. But when I watch it in action, I can see there’s a lot more going on here – a lot more mechanical depth and smart design – than might initially meet the eye.

This is how it works. Four teams of four players all begin a match in specific, separated parts of the map. This area will be their base for the entirety of the game, and it’s going to become much more important as the fight ticks on. Every team has a limited number of respawn tickets and the goal, in the most basic sense, is to be the final squad left alive – eliminate the enemy players over and over again until you’ve drained them of all their respawns. Sounds like standard fare so far, but there’s a twist.

Rather than tickets per se, respawns in fact rely on energy – every time a player dies and comes back to life, it drains a chunk of their team’s energy. However, by capturing ‘Hearts,’ special items that periodically appear in the map’s center, and bringing them back to your respective base, you can recharge your team’s energy and thus allow them more respawns.

But on top of that twist in the formula, Heart Electric introduces another complexifying mechanic, since even when you recover a Heart and install it back at HQ, opposing teams can ‘hack’ your Heart and drain its energy all for themselves.

As such, Heart Electric becomes a combination of deathmatch, capture the flag, and extraction shooter. Tactics vary. You might want to risk it and try to gather as many Hearts as possible, or maybe you work the ambush angle, wait for your opponent to carry the Heart back to base, and initiate a hack. Alternatively, you can ignore the Hearts, go brute force, and try to drain your enemy’s respawns through sheer kills.

Once two teams of the four have been eliminated completely, the entire energy system explodes and there are no more respawns available for anybody. At this point, Heart Electric transforms again, this time into the closing stages of a battle royale game. The boundaries of the map move inward, pushing the last remaining players together. The dead stay dead. The last team alive wins it all.

But even then, Heart Electric adds further details and layers. Every player has access to a kind of magnetic whip that they can use to either pick up metallic objects and throw them, usually to create large-scale explosions, or to quickly traverse the map like a freerunner.

Zoom across the ground, zap yourself up to a sniper’s roost, swing away from a battle to safety – as well as its unique match setup, Heart Electric also boasts these slick movement mechanics that diversify combat. Combined with the various perks and abilities that you can choose before the match starts, every game has the potential to feel vastly different from the last.

For now, Heart Electric is still in development and there’s no release date, but if the hero shooter has recently felt like it’s past its best, Modoyo’s debut is reason to believe that might not be true.

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