Marsh Davies
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Writing For
Rock Paper ShotgunLatest Reviews
It’s not the only struggle HotS has with itself as it moves towards a dual destiny as the genre’s most accessible offering and as an e-sport capable of supporting an extremely high level of play. It’s a game that dearly wants you to have fun, and fast. It’s quick, colourful and without pretension. The map-specific gimmicks inject dynamism into matches that, given its relatively reduced hero complexity, might otherwise risk strategic stagnation. I don’t really buy the notion that it is significantly dumbed down - many of the ways in which it is a more transparent game than its competitors are simply good design choices - but, in its map design, HotS defers some of the responsibility players might otherwise have to AI. Dota fans I know take this as something of an affront to their agency and I haven’t yet decided if that’s fair or not. Blizzard may need to choose who it is building and balancing the game for: an elitist hardcore, obsessed with stats, strats and ranking, or the morass of folk with a more casual but hardly contemptible interest in just enjoying themselves. Perhaps Heroes of the Storm is neither quite one thing nor the other...
There’s a jolly but ephemeral pleasure in modes that pit you against an opposing team, each tasked with painting the level your colour, or dunking a basketball, even if they invariably descend into fisticuffs. But this stuff’s just the intermission ice cream - the main performance here is the singleplayer campaign. Castle Crashers showed the developers could make a game of splashily kinetic thrills and gleeful immaturity; Battleblock’s meticulous mechanical design, its taut level construction and soaring learning curve shows that they’ve grown up - if only in the ways that matter. Parp!