RATINGS:

Graphics: 8
Gameplay: 8.5
Sound: 8

Overall: 8

Pros: Many new features add a fresh twist to an ever popular genre.

Cons: Prolonged gameplay could put people off, though there might be other modes where this perhaps is less the case.

                                                                                                                   

We recently dedicated some of our time to check out on Smite, the 3rd-person MOBA developed by Hi-Rez Studios, which thrusts players in a war among immortals and gods originating from a wide variety of mythologies and religions in front of a fresh MOBA backdrop with some innovative twists. While, in all honesty, the MOBA genre is brimming with a plethora of titles seeking (without much effort or dedication) to reinvent the wheel and many of them turn out to be the same kind of game in a different wrapping, we really think the developers of Smite succeeded in doing things in a different way. The 3rd-person view truly adds something fresh to the game’s strategy aspect.

Our dedicated author hasn’t been the greatest MOBA fan so far and only dipped his toe tips in the large pool of the genre by trying out League of Legends (LoL) and a few new competitors such as Merc Elite and Infinite Crisis. While all those offer something different to the genre, with Smite we truly had the impression that it played in an entirely different way. Right from the beginning, we were forced to continually have a glimpse over our shoulder, always fearing somebody might show up in our back to attack out of the blue, which was an inevitable and undeniable fact as we frequently got our butt kicked in every occasion.

At its heart, Smite is petty similar to LoL; there minions, bases, towers and lanes players must battle their way through. However, depending on the different game modes, they come in distinct variants: some present the traditional 3-lane-plus-jungle type, others only have one lane and side jungles or no jungle at all. During our trial, we opted for the classic 3-lane mode to stick with the familiar. We previously completed the tutorial which introduced us to the W, A, S, D keyboard focused controls that required some getting used to while the rest was quite easy to pick up. There’s also an exclusive first look video of this and we highly recommend checking it out if you haven’t done yet.

We discovered some essential trimmings to the core game that slightly changed our general expectations, which were first and foremost the Titans and the Phoenix "towers". There’s an AI controlled Titan NPC in each team’s base the opponent has to defeat to stand out victorious. These hard-hitting Titans with their huge amount of HP indeed require the whole team to succeed in getting them killed, which results in a kind of sub game within the match.

The Phoenixes are positioned in front of the base at each lane’s end, acting like super towers that hit harder than those spread along the lanes. They are additionally able to continuously restore their HP and will even respawn some instances after being destroyed. And as if this wasn’t enough, a killed Phoenix causes the enemy minions to turn into a flaming variant with increased attack and health.

Already during champion selection for our match and the team chat, we got aware of the fact that no one among us had ever played a single Smite match before and therefore were prepared ourselves for a humiliating defeat (although we didn’t have any idea either of how seasoned the opponent team really was, but one already had access to a non-starter god...).

The match began and in good old newbie style all of us headed off, pretty much doing our own thing without any interaction that would deserve the term "communication". We just gave it a shot to find out how Smite played and we honestly have to say that it was so much fun.

It didn’t take long to loose the major part of our towers in the lanes, but for some obscure reason the opponent team had a quite hard time to overwhelm our Phoenixes, eventually taking one of them down, which allowed them a few attacks on our Titan before we respawned and were able to drive them back again.

More than 30 minutes had passed and we were still fighting while the opponent apparently wasn’t able to take the win, which they finally did although their position pretty much remained the same over the last 15 minutes of the battle. This is one of the most important issues with MOBAs for many players; they are simply not casual enough to pick them up and play a few matches, they instead involve a certain risk of really getting locked into a stalemate fight for way too much time. Despite the prolonged match length and our subsequent crushing defeat, we still had a particularly enjoyable time in game.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2014 at 11:35 am and is filed under MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Puedes dejar una respuesta, o un trackback desde tu sitio web.