Today marks the launch of the first public test of Battlefield One, the latest entry in the massive-team online-shooting series, and if you own a Windows PC, Xbox One, or PlayStation 4, you can now freely download and test this game for a little over a week: until September 8, to be precise. Our hands-on time with the game has come mostly at expos, and while that was relatively brief, I knew mostly what to expect from this World War I-flavored take on the series.

Still, I was glad to get a day of early access to the beta, which allowed me to put the PS4 and Windows versions to the test. In good news, the action is competent, and the game’s 1930s weaponry and machinery work to the action’s benefit. In even better news, performance on this in-progress beta is quite good on PC—and surprisingly smooth and detailed on PS4.

Leagues beyond Superman 64

I tested the PC version of this World War I-era shooter on an i7-4770K rig, matched with a GeForce GTX 980Ti and 16GB of RAM, and I was able to play BF1 at maxed-out settings (“ultra”) at a frame rate not quite sitting stably at 60 frames per second. Dropping down to “high” settings helped, but I still saw a few frame rate stutters—and I’m hopeful this technical hiccuping will be settled by further refinement, polishing, and bug-testing ahead of the game’s October 21 launch.