14 DAY TRIAL // When Blizzard Entertainment announced that Heroes of the Storm would be a hero brawler, and not a multiplayer online battle arena, I thought that they were just trying to coin their own term.
After having played it for a while, I now believe that they didn't insist enough on the fact that the game offers an experience which is completely different from the usual dynamic of Dota 2 or League of Legends.
Heroes of the Storm is currently in closed beta, and this is the gist of it: you pick your favorite hero from across the Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo franchises and then enter a battleground where you kill enemy heroes and work together with the rest of your team to accomplish some map-specific objectives.
Unique gameplay twists
The 5v5 action is nothing new, but the main difference from proper MOBA games is the fact that there is no more laning phase, where you stay put and farm creeps. There are no more last hits, no denies, and all experience is shared throughout a team.
Furthermore, there is no gold, and if an enemy unit dies while in your proximity, you automatically get xp from it, even if you didn't do any damage.
No gold means no items, which makes the game much more streamlined and easy to pick up, but at the same time removes some of the interesting experimental bits, like playing ability power Master Yi in League of Legends.
By far, the biggest game-changer is in the maps. There are several different battlegrounds where, apart from the usual mix of pushing creep waves down two or three lanes and taking down enemy towers and forts, there also other things to pay attention to.
First of all, there is no jungling. When you defeat a neutral camp, it respawns under the banner of your faction and then enters the lane, helping you push toward the enemy base.
In addition to this, each map has a certain flavor and unique mechanics that are instrumental in securing victory, from gathering dubloons from chests scattered across the map to pay a pirate captain at the center to launch a volley of cannonballs on the enemy encampment, to gathering seeds to power your very own Garden Horror, a hulking siege beast that can single-handedly storm into the enemy base.
First impressions
I've been having a really good time with the game overall, and so far I intend to keep playing it on a daily basis. It's fun and innovative and its biggest achievement is that it removes the tedium of MOBAs.
I'm already bored with the passive approach of sitting in your lane and farming, last hitting and harassing, I simply don't have the patience to do it anymore. After years of enjoying Dota and League of Legends, whenever I think about installing either of them, I get an instant sense of dread and apprehension.
I want to relax, and the game mechanics are challenging enough without having to make a time investment in an extended wind-up that may turn out to be unsatisfactory due to inept team mates.
Heroes of the Storm has so far been a good substitute, as it's still challenging enough, and you have to focus and play pretty hard if you want to win, but it's more lighthearted and the action starts a couple of minutes into the game.
Of course, that convenience comes at the price of complexity, and that means that Heroes of the Storm might never be as satisfying to a hardcore player as the classics are, but for everyone else, it's a blast.
It focuses a lot more on team battles (an aspect that made me shift to League of Legends when it first came out) and on roaming the map, and the minions and map objectives are novel ideas that can deliver strong gameplay dynamic shifts.
The level difference between teams is never too big, and you won't get completely trashed by the enemy time and time again until the inevitable end. There are many situations in which good coordination can put the enemy on the defensive and give you a fighting chance, enabling you to steal an unlikely win in an otherwise lost scenario.
Blizzard managed to disassemble the Defense of the Ancient formula and to put it back together in a shiny package, much more accessible and convenient, that manages to keep the focus on team strategy and timing, but removes the encyclopedic knowledge barrier of the genre.
