The new MOBA from Blizzard, Heroes of the Storm, sees players taking on the role of the key heroes and villains from the various Blizzard franchise games; Diablo, Warcraft, StarCraft and The Lost Vikings in a 5v5 battle across a variety of maps. In the game players can unlock new characters, each of which having their unique abilities and playstyles, and team up with other players to go up against other players or challenging intelligent AI bots. Whilst Blizzard are never shy about trying to make a few dollars from their fans we take a look at the game to see how truly free to play this F2P MOBA is.

Heroes of the Storm is completely free to play after an initial client download.



There are no subscription options to the game at all.



As far as game content goes the game releases new maps (each having a unique game mode) occasionally and these are added into the base game free of charge.



Players can purchase new characters, skins and mounts using in game gold that is earned through completing daily quests and being successful in matches, however there are lots of characters, skins and mounts available and it would take a long time to buy them all simply by playing. Everything can also be acquired by paying real world cash and the prices change from character to character, with some skins and mounts only being purchasable with cash.



The primary microtransactions give players more variety with new characters and simply the aesthetic options to make them stand out more to other players, but do not offer any improved mechanics. Players can purchase XP/Gold boosts that will allow them to level up characters more quickly, but again this simply gives characters more cosmetic options and provided no real gameplay advantage.



There are no UI customization options in the game.


All characters are restricted unless a player purchases them, which adds them to their available characters to play whenever they wish. However, the game does give a rotation system each week where new characters become playable so that players can test them out for the duration before choosing to buy them with gold or real money.



There is no in-game trading and the shop is accessible to everyone.



There are no restrictions to how many characters a player can own or any other restriction that paying real cash can unlock.



Some features are level restricted, but these cannot be bypassed by simply spending money.



Hero League allows players to compete in ranked matches and is restricted to players who have reached level 30 on their account and purchased at least 10 heroes to play with, this is due to the fact that in Hero League players can only select characters they own to fight with and you can’t have the same character selected twice, as games are 5v5 this means that with 10 characters then even if the other players selected nine of the characters you own you still have at least one character. It can take a while to get 10 characters, but many of the Heroes are cheap and on the way to level 30 players can acquire a lot of gold simply through playing.



All the core features of the game are available including numerous maps and game modes with a good selection of available free characters to play as; the more you play the more characters you unlock and finding a handful of characters you enjoy playing can be extremely fun.


If you want to know more of the game, take a look at our profile by clicking on the Info button below.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2015 at 6:54 pm 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.