Heroes
of the Storm is not just another MOBA. It's a comment on the MOBA by the
company whose games inspired the genre. With it, Blizzard step into territory
that is both deeply familiar and deeply alien to them: a world of chunky
characters and competitive strategy that they embrace alongside a world of
fathomless homebrew complexity that they don't. This is a studio that has
always valorised accessibility and has lately had that belief galvanised by the
striking success of Hearthstone. Heroes of the Storm is a MOBA for people who
don't play MOBAs, therefore—perhaps even a MOBA for people who don't like
MOBAs.
It'll
be divisive for that reason, I suspect. In designing Heroes of the Storm,
Blizzard have stripped away many of the ideas that previously defined the
genre. Individual leveling is gone, replaced with a team-wide experience bar.
Gold is gone, and with it items that boost your character's powers. Strategic
drafting is gone, at least until you complete the long climb to competitive
ranked play: for the majority of players, Heroes of the Storm is a game where
you pick who you want to play, click 'Play', and play.
Doing
so places you in a team of five fantasy heroes drawn from Blizzard's wide
roster. Victory means pushing AI-controlled creeps from one side of the map to
another along linear lanes. This means passing through the gateways, towers and
fortresses that amount to your opponent's outer defenses, and when one team's
core falls the game is over. Here the comparisons to other MOBAs end.
Heroes
of the Storm has seven maps at present, and each of these offers a different
layout and a different set of optional objectives. In Sky Temple, capturing
shrines and defeating guardians grants your team the assistance of a
building-felling laser weapon. In Blackheart's Bay, collecting coins for a
ghostly pirate allows you to turn his cannons on your enemy. In Haunted Mines,
the whole bottom level of the map—the titular mines—amount to a side-dungeon
where you gather undead skulls to power up your team's hulking golem.
Diverse
as individual objectives are, they amount to the same thing: a reason to leave
your lane and fight elsewhere. Sit in one place clicking minions and you'll
find yourself quickly overwhelmed as your opponent takes control of the map,
and with it the neutral monsters and bosses that can be defeated and recruited
to join one side or the other.
All
heroes begin with three abilities alongside a passive power (although these
sometimes have an active component) and earn an ultimate when their team
reaches level ten. Heroes of the Storm often feels like entering a Dota 2 match
in the middle, and within a fifteen minutes you can be playing out battle
scenarios that would amount to the endgame of a fifty-minute epic elsewhere.
These
scenarios are likely thanks to a generous number of comeback systems. Games
rarely feel lost within the first few minutes—although this doesn't stop a
certain section of the game's community from angrily abandoning matches after
an early setback. Teams that are behind receive bonus experience, and the
plurality of optional objectives means that there is almost always something
you can do to turn your fortunes around—you just need to figure out what it is.
These
decisions make Heroes of the Storm the most accessible MOBA I have ever played.
They amount to a striking simplification of the genre's vocabulary, boiling the
most opaque sector of competitive gaming to a handful of verbs: attack, defend,
capture, collect. With this, it opens up the basic strategic pleasure of
five-on-five fantasy battle to an audience that might never have otherwise
tried it.
Coming
to Heroes of the Storm as somebody who is already heavily invested in this
genre, I've found my attitude continually shift. There are times when I've felt
like a rally driver on a go-kart track. In these moments I've yearned for a
game where failure is more significant and victories mean more, where I can
make use of the entire secret language these games have taught me rather than a
small part of it. I suspect this will be the experience of many existing MOBA
players, and that the more cynical of these will write Heroes of the Storm off
entirely.
I
don't think that's fair. As much as Heroes of the Storm truncates the genre, it
preserves strategic concepts that are more advanced than those that have been
removed. Items, skill builds and so on are all knowledge barriers: with a bit
of perseverance, every player will eventually move past them. In knocking down
that barrier, Blizzard have created a game that is entirely about map control,
timing, momentum, and combat finesse. These are things that take time to fully
internalise, a set of learnings that only come with experience.
One
of the ironies of Heroes of the Storm's accessibility is that, in removing the
obvious impediments, it drops new players right in the strategic deep end.
Given the amount going on in any given map and the apparent 'looseness' of the
laning system, it's easy to lose matches quickly and not really know why. Play
Heroes purely as a 'hero brawler'—Blizzard's preferred term—and you'll find
yourself outmaneuvered by players who understand that there's a time to fight,
a time to hide, a time to sweep the map for objectives.
These
considerations are just as compelling as 'what item do I build next'. Heroes of
the Storm loses out in terms of systemic complexity and the creative potential
that comes with it, but does an impressive job of introducing new players to
the map-wide strategic element that makes these games so compelling to watch
and play. Where the game stumbles, it doesn't stumble because it's accessible.
Although
the feel of the game has improved since I first played it at Blizzcon 2013,
Heroes of the Storm doesn't match the high standard that Blizzard have set
elsewhere. This is particularly apparent in the case of the Diablo heroes—in
their original incarnations, these are defined by the damage they dish out, by
the sense of force imparted with every click. In Heroes of the Storm, that edge
has been stripped away. What would be a bone-crushing slam in Diablo 3 becomes
a weedy thump here.
Heroes
of the Storm's avatars occupy far more screen-space than their equivalents in
League or Dota, and combined with much smaller maps this gives the sense of
being a bigger kid in a smaller sandpit. On the other hand, abilities feel
rather muted: stuns are short, damage is low, particle effects simple and
brief. These two factors contribute to the sense that your individual power is
limited.
I
don't believe that Heroes of the Storm lives up to the best of Blizzard's
visual work, either. These games have always looked like a teenager's
sketchbook given life, but now it feels like that sketchbook has been through
the corporate photocopier one too many times. Blizzard's latter-day love affair
with PopCap is evident in the little details—like the way that turrets and
gates screw themselves into place, Game of Thrones intro-style, at the start of
every match—but this doesn't make up for the general lack of atmosphere. The
StarCraft, WarCraft and Diablo universes, when seen through the same
technicolour filter, lose their distinctiveness.
It
is also, at present, a little too eager for both your time and your money.
Although the worst excesses of account-wide levelling were excised during the
beta, you still need to grind away to unlock every talent and skill for every
character, and if you want to play outside of the rotation of free heroes then
you're looking a week of running daily quests every day in order to save up
enough gold for one or two characters of your own. Unlocking ranked play takes
about 40 hours—double that if you're not using a premium booster—and this feels
like a misstep in a game that otherwise doesn't provide you with many ways to
gauge your growth as a player.
I
feel comfortable recommending Heroes of the Storm despite these issues. In some
ways, I feel more comfortable recommending it than I do Dota 2, a game I have
committed a substantial amount of my time to. This is because Blizzard has
created a MOBA that doesn't require you to commit your life, or even an entire
week, to get something out of it. The benefit for newcomers is obvious. The
benefit for existing MOBA players is more subtle: we finally have a fit ambassador
for our genre. Heroes of the Storm may be divisive, but I hope it isn't. I hope
that this is the game that shows people who don't like MOBAs what they're
missing.
Need To Know
Reviewed On: Intel i5-2500K, 16Gb RAM, GeForce GTX 970
Price: Free with microtransactions
Release Date: Out now
Publisher: In house
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Multiplayer: Local co-op
Website: Official site
Price: Free with microtransactions
Release Date: Out now
Publisher: In house
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Multiplayer: Local co-op
Website: Official site
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