Heroes of the Storm review: into the breach

The multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) saw its main genesis with mods for Blizzard's 2002 release Warcraft 3 and its expansion The Frozen Throne. The result, called Defense of the Ancients or DOTA, grew massively, evolving over several years into its own game. In turn, DOTA's runaway cult success spawned independent successors in 2009 with a tiny game called League of Legends — created in concert with some of the main minds behind the most popular iterations of DOTA — and in 2011, Valve Software worked in concert with other DOTA community luminaries to create Dota 2.

The genre has seen multiple releases since then, though nothing has come close to the audience stranglehold maintained by LoL or Dota 2, games that still bear the influence and, in many cases, the art style and trappings of Blizzard's original work. Some of the characters in Heroes of the Storm making return appearances from Warcraft 3 literally share lines of dialogue with their analogues in Dota 2.

But Blizzard knows that they can't copy the work that borrowed and remixed their original evolution of the real-time strategy genre with a heavy infusion of RPG elements. Instead, it's gone back to the drawing board, tinkering, removing elements, streamlining and simplifying a notoriously difficult-to-learn style of game. The result is something familiar to MOBA fans that new players might find more approachable. But in their efforts to make a faster, simpler game, Heroes of the Storm has introduced different challenges it doesn't manage as well.

For the MOBA-illiterate, Heroes of the Storm works like this: You're assigned to a team with four other players, and each side has a primary base structure. To win, you and your teammates must destroy the other team's main structure. You gain access to that base via two or more "lanes" on each map that lead directly to your opponent, but these are guarded by walls and towers that fire at intruders. To help you, your base periodically spawns AI units that walk down each lane, attempting to destroy anything in their path, including the enemy's AI units, structures and players.

Before each game starts, you'll select a hero taken from Blizzard's oeuvre of games — Heroes of the Storm borrows from almost every major release in the developer's catalog, smashing them against each other. Your hero starts each match at level one, but as the game progresses, you'll earn experience and grow more powerful in various ways. Each hero has a set of three regular skills that can be used periodically and an ultimate ability that is available much more rarely, and using these skills, you'll want to eventually knock the other team's main tower down.

This is standard MOBA structure, give or take a few deviations. Heroes of the Storm ties your fate directly to your teammates, as each player on your team earns the same amount of experience at all times. Experience is earned by making sure someone from your team is present in each lane when the enemy's AI units are killed and when your team kills the other side's heroes. A rising tide raises all ships; a sinking ship drowns everyone on board.

Speaking for its most basic mechanics, Heroes of the Storm works well. Everything is as responsive as you could like, animations are uniformly great — this is where the Blizzard pedigree shines through.

But everyone who's played a MOBA or an RTS for any length of time could probably tell you that it's not about basic mechanics, it's about the game design around them. And this is where Heroes of the Storm's biggest changes feel the most drastic, and the most potentially contentious.

Dota 2 and League of Legends emphasize in-match economies of gold and items to buy that augment the abilities of heroes. Heroes of the Storm discards this idea, which brings good news and bad news.

The good news first: The item economy is easily the most difficult-to-grasp element of other MOBAs, a system of dozens or even hundreds of different things that can make or break a hero. Heroes in those games are designed with items in mind, and their effectiveness can hinge on when they have enough gold to buy important additions to their repertoire.

Ignoring my greater fluency in MOBA 101 after playing more than a thousand hours of Dota 2, I felt like I could get a basic grasp on Heroes of the Storm's character fundamentals in minutes, generally speaking. I'm not discounting the potential for high level play with Heroes of the Storm's characters, as some are very complicated in ways that also eschew easy comparisons with other MOBAs. But Blizzard's design is much less aloof. It also helps that ability cooldowns seem very fast — using an ability at the wrong time while learning a character doesn't warrant the kind of forehead slap that it does in Heroes' genre companions.

Also, matches feel extremely active, and this really helps Heroes of the Storm build its own distinct feel and rhythm. Fights start early, and there aren't many gaps between those clashes. There's not much in the way of downtime because players aren't farming items, and games in Heroes of the Storm typically take much less time than Dota 2 or LoL — I found the average to be somewhere around 20 to 25 minutes.

But the elimination of in-match item progression comes at a cost.

In DOTA, and Dota 2 and League of Legends, items offer a set of variable tools, a number of possible solutions to an enormous amount of potential problems. More bluntly, items are a point of balance to make sure that no one hero in the game is too weak or too powerful. They allow a greater potential viability to a game's hero pool, a way to react or shift focus if a game is going poorly. This is missing in Heroes of the Storm.

It's too early to know if this is going to be a serious problem for Heroes of the Storm, as competitive games with as many characters as HoTS have metas — the overarching combination of game theory and strategy developed by the community — that take weeks or months to shake out. But it puts an enormous amount of pressure on Blizzard and the game's designers to make sure every character is balanced against every other character particularly well — and also that every character is potentially balanced against each of Heroes' maps.

Heroes of the Storm's maps add the variety that its mechanical simplification minimized. Each map has a special objective that can radically change the balance of power between teams.