I started playing Heroes of the Storm this month, which is a game made by Blizzard for desktop that is based off of DOTA (which in turn was based off of Warcraft 3 so I guess this has gone full circle). DOTA really kicked of the trend of MOBA games and Blizzard wanted to get in on the action with its own free-to-play version.

The genre has evolved since I last played DOTA, which I guess was about back in 2009 or 2010. I haven’t played League of Legends or DOTA2 and the gameplay in HoTS is a bit different than DOTA. I’m not sure if they introduced those changes or if that’s the way the genre works now. In any case, HoTS makes the game a lot more accessible (no more recipes & items to build, last hit creeps, etc) but it looks like there’s still significant depth in the skills that you pick for a hero so you can play them in different ways.

I like the fact that you gain experience and game progress outside of each match (something that wasn’t possible with the way that DOTA was architected as a mod) and the addition of secondary objectives (in addition to ganking and pushing) are interesting; but after playing each map a couple of times, they get a bit tiring. I played intensely for about a week, but after awhile it feels like DOTA again and not that compelling. At least they don’t have monthly awards for ranked play like Hearthstone does so I don’t have to keep opening it up later.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: games