Heroes of the Storm, a traditional lane based Mobile Battle Arena (MOBA) developed and published by Blizzard that take players to the Nexus, a place where Heroes from many worlds have been brought together to fight in an endless battle.

The playable Heroes take form of some of the most loved character from the various Blizzard titles and will go head to head in a 5 v 5 objective focused battle across numerous maps, each with their own unique elements and sub-objectives. So let’s break down the game and check out its Good & Bad points:

The Good

• Your Favourite Characters From Blizzard – Players can step into the shoes of characters from Diablo, StarCraft, World of WarCraft and even The Lost Vikings; a huge selection of Heroes to choose from


• Numerous Unique Objective Maps – With 10 maps currently in game every match has a single objective: destroy the enemy core, but each map has unique objectives on how this can be accomplished from collecting doubloons and handing them to a Ghost Pirate to fire his ship cannons on structures or collecting seeds to turn into a fearsome shambling Garden Terror


• Reporting Toxic Players - Built into the game is a conveniently silence feature to ignore abusive/annoying players from team chat or report them directly, enough reports and players become “Silenced” and are unable to talk in any team chat for a number of hours


• Quick Match Lengths – On average games last around 20 minutes, Hero strength and death timers increase, as do the power of map sub-objectives, with a snowball effect to ensure shorter match times to appeal to a more casual player


• Unique Hero Mechanics - Some Heroes have extremely unique mechanics such as the three Lost Vikings who can all be controlled by a single player but split up and managed separately in a game, to one of the newer additions the two-headed ogre Cho’gall that is a single character controlled by two players: one plays Cho and has tank abilities and determines where the character moves, the other plays Gall who has mage abilities and fires off ranged attacks!


• Item Free – No more confusing shopping and having to combine items and work out what you need to buy, instead players have streamlined talents every 3 levels that they can choose from to make their build


• Murky – Who doesn’t love that little Murloc?! Mrglrglmrglmrrrlggg!

The Bad

• Pricey – The cash cost of Heroes in the online shop are pretty expensive, more expensive than any other MOBA


• Can’t Create Clans – Although a feature the DEVs want, it’s currently not high up on their priority list, which is a shame as a big portion of the community play other Blizzard games and come from guilds where these features already exist


• Can’t Choose/Vote For Maps – Only pre-made custom games (requiring 10 friends or an organized group) can choose a map, everyone else is in random map rotation, meaning you can play on the same maps quite often during a single session


• Dodgy MMR Matchmaking – Sometimes high ranked players can end up in games with much lower ranked players, which means low ranked players are up against someone with a hell of a lot more skill, but also the high ranked player can end up on a team of newbies who lose the game and lower his MMR (win/loss) rating…


• Quicker Match Lengths – Not everyone likes a quick match, so it should be seen as a Good and Bad point, some players really like the longer timed matches from the like of League of Legends and DOTA2’s 40 minute endurance slogs


• Team XP – There are no individual player levels in a match, any XP gained through minion waves, Hero kills or objectives contributes to the teams XP and everyone levels up and gains new talents at the same time; similarly dying to the enemy gives their entire team XP, so your own team is only going to be as strong as the weakest/selfish/feeder player


• Silenced Player Pinging - When a player has been Silenced for being toxic and they can’t chat, they still have the ability to ping the map (with an icon and a ding), which generally results in them spamming the pings like crazy and annoying the entire team as you can’t silence their pings...


• Draft Mode Lacks Ban Feature – In the drafting game mode/ Hero League there’s no options for having a ban feature to restrict enemy Hero choices, even the pro-tournaments require using a separate interface or program to choose their bans

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2016 at 9:46 am and is filed under Articles, MMO News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.