Given the origins of the online battle arena genre, in which StarCraft and Warcraft III modifications played a major role, it was only a matter of time: Blizzard has thrown down its hand in the MOBA market. Heroes of the Storm is yet another example of the quality we expect from the developer: ideas that have been explored elsewhere are given a level of refinement and accessibility that makes the eventual result nigh impossible to dislike. Heroes of the Storm is fantastic, assembling Blizzard's colorful characters into a highly absorbing tactical arena game.
As with games like League of Legends and Dota 2, two teams of five face off with the goal of destroying the opponent's base. Unlike those games, however, the map upon which teams face off is not a near carbon copy of those from other genres. Heroes of the Storm features seven unique maps with various secondary objectives that can assist a team in their siege of the enemy base. Each of these secondary objectives serves to create interesting movement and points of conflict, thus preventing the game from devolving into poke wars or stalemates where teams are too afraid to engage with each other.
B.F.R.
One such map is the Garden of Terror, in which players collect seeds from monsters upon nightfall in order to summon and take control of a garden terror of their own, which has the power to turn foes into zombie plants and plant vines that temporarily disable enemy towers. The garden terror's massive health pool forces the opposing team to take it down before it wreaks havoc upon their bases. Furthermore, controlling the garden terror can lead to an interesting minigame of keep-away in the early stages of the game, as you sprint to drop the vines in every lane you can manage before your empowered state runs out or your terror is killed.
In another map, The Haunted Mines, the secondary objective sends players underground, off the main area of the map to collect skulls that empower their team's massive grave golem. The power of each team's golem depends on the number of the 100 available skulls they are able to acquire. Teams must react and take position according to how well they managed to acquire skulls underground while the mines were open. A stronger enemy golem requires staunch defenses, while golems relatively even in power enable more versatile splits of defenders and attackers. Each team's golem pushes opposite lanes, and upon collection of another 100 skulls, revives wherever it died previously, adding a sense of dread when an enemy's golem dies close to your core. The battles with the grave golem are the main course, certainly, but the skirmishes in the mines and the tight interplay of fending off the enemy team while your team slays the mine's boss is quite the appetizing hors d'oeuvre.
..ladies...
Blackheart's Bay, the Tomb of the Spider Queen, and Dragon Shire are all battlegrounds supporting intense and exhilarating comebacks. The game's inherent comeback mechanics, such as longer death timers for higher level players, and map-specific secondary objectives, offer the trailing team plenty of opportunities to close the gap. In Dragon Shire, for instance, players may channel the great power of the towering warrior known as the dragon knight, allowing one hero to temporarily transform into the knight. Each successive dragon knight summon is stronger, leading to a progressively thrilling brawl each time the dragon knight is summoned.
One of Heroes of the Storm's primary draws is its cast of characters from Blizzard's various franchises. Warcraft's Uther, Malfurion, Illidan, Jaina, Thrall, and others face off against StarCraft's Raynor, Kerrigan, Tychus, Tassadar, and Zeratul as well as Diablo's Diablo, Azmodan, Tyrael, and a few representatives of the Diablo III playable characters. Despite being essentially recycled pre-existing characters, Heroes of the Storm's character design still greatly impresses. Diablo offers his signature red lightning breath as an area-of-effect team fight ultimate, while Raynor may call in help from the Hyperion Battlecruiser to rain down fire from above. Arthas summons Sindragosa to freeze all in her path. These characters bring their own signature moves from their franchises into the arena with them, while still sliding neatly into the mold of a different genre.
While most characters fit into the standard classes of Warrior (tanks with crowd control), Assassin (sustained damage and nuking mages), and Supports (mostly healers), Heroes of the Storm features a fourth classification: Specialists. Specialists all have mechanics unique to their characters and don't really compare to the other characters in the game. Abathur may attach a symbiote to an allied unit in order to launch his attacks from the safety of his own base. Azmodan empowers nearby minions while summoning a relative army all his own. Murky, the Baby Murloc, may lay an egg anywhere on the map in order to respawn there within a few seconds of death, rather than the long respawn timer to revive in base. The Specialist characters offer an entirely different perspective on Heroes of the Storm's gameplay.
Ideas that have been explored elsewhere are given a level of refinement and accessibility that makes the eventual, golden result nigh impossible to dislike.
Of the many heroes I played, only one made me question its usefulness--and only one other made me feel unstoppable. Overall, excellent hero balancing means that you rarely assume that a game is over before it starts because one team has a hero that yours doesn't--except perhaps when an opposing player has chosen Sylvanas. The slight imbalances that do exist are cleverly blanketed by the team-focused design that encourage grouping and teamwork, as well as by the game's matchmaking, which prioritizes balanced team composition over throwing five assassin players into a team. Occasionally, some combinations of heroes are a perfect storm that causes one particular hero shine--Illidan with a healer and an Abathur on his team is one such instance--which may lead to perceived imbalances. But once you realize Illidan isn't the only one doing work, the illusion is dispelled.
As your character levels up during a match, you choose how to customize your build using various stat-boosting talents that augment your character's skills. Skills improve in damage on their own as you gain levels, but talents may add additional damage or effects to those skills. For example, Stitches must choose between extending the reach of his hook or enabling it to snag a second target; Valla and Falstad may choose between empowering their basic attacks or shifting more damage to their abilities. Each character has a set of unique choices to customize your style either to your own personal preference, or to suit the map. There are no items to buy in Heroes of the Storm: all of your character customization is handled solely by the talent system. One of my frustrations with the game stems from talents, as two or three of the available talents per level are gated behind a hero mastery system that requires you to play several games as the hero before you are allowed to select some of the more advanced masteries. This cripples character potential in Quick Match and encourages players to grind for experience in matches versus the less capable AI in order to level up their hero's mastery.
Heroes of the Storm is a free-to-play game; thus, playable characters are limited to a free week rotation and characters are unlocked through Gold (earned by playing) or real money. With the existence of daily quests such as "Win three games" or "Play two games as a Diablo character," gold comes easily, and it never feels like it will take days of playing to unlock whatever character you're looking for. Bonus gold is also given out at various account level milestones and for reaching mastery level five of a character. Overall, the free-to-play structure doesn't feel greedy or insurmountable, even when you only casually engage. Admittedly, it may take a long time to unlock every character in the game, but unlocking a decent variety of characters should come rather easily. I'm admittedly not the best person to trust with regards to games labeled "free-to-play" though; I've spent over a thousand dollars in League of Legends over the years.
Chef Stitches brings the Meat Hooks.
Match length in Heroes of the Storm is short, relative to other games in the genre. Rather than spending an hour or longer hoping for a game to finally come to an end, matches are often decisively ended within 20 minutes. There are outliers that drag on beyond 40, as evenly matched teams may have trouble managing to end the game against one another, but the game's rapidly scaling death timers generally enable one team to end the competition before that point is reached. Usually, games are over quickly enough that you'll convince yourself you always have time for one more game.
If you wish to shine individually, you may not enjoy Heroes of the Storm; the game is very team-centric, to the point that even experience is shared across an entire team--all players on the same team are the same level during a match. An individual's power to affect a match is limited. Grouping up is essential to winning matches, and attempting any sort of heroic 1-vs.-5 play will likely be met with death. This serves to reduce the amount of rampant toxicity the genre is rather notorious for bringing; most game and chat experiences feature very few instances of nasty epithets, and with cross-team chat disabled outright, there is no opportunity for insulting opponents.
The environments, animations, and sounds of combat all evoke a mental investment in the action. Animations are simultaneously flashy and elegant, and ability animations feature enough clarity that it's rare to be confused about what killed you. Tassadar's Psionic Storm crackles and flashes for each enemy it hits. As E.T.C. The Rock God leaps into the fray from across the map, a rocking guitar riff signals his landing. The comical trio of Lost Vikings mounts up into its longboat when activating a heroic ability, and the three sing a merry tune as they rain cannon fire down on nearby foes and towers. And the sound of a dead hero (with which you will become very familiar) features a bass "shoomp" to draw just the right amount of satisfaction for each and every kill your team secures.
Heroes of the Storm is a must-play for both MOBA players and Blizzard enthusiasts. It avoids stepping into the exact footprints of the games that paved the way for the genre, and delivers a beautifully graceful, unique experience with familiar characters. And should you not fall into either category, it is still a fantastic casual-competitive game that offers untold hours of enjoyment.
Decades of what we'll call... light incest finally blew up in my face. I'd crushed the Cadence at every turn for 150 years. They could not stand up to the unified might of the houses that protected the realm, the houses that had fought the demonic incursion for generations. Their ancestors had lived and died--some on the battlefield, more at home in their beds; they had married and borne children and ruled the lands. But they were mortal, and I was not, and I didn't merely witness the rise and fall of dynasties: I guided them. I forged marriages and alliances and ensured a stream of children for the war effort. But... best laid plans and whatnot... I learned that I was not cut out to meddle in eugenics.
I'd spent so long focusing on maximizing the fertility of the land that I'd lost sight of a more important concern: can any of these love-crazed rabbits actually fight? And while my soldiers were many, they were weak; my hunters (read: archers) had the vision of Mr. Magoo and the mobility of Chris Redfield in the 1996 Resident Evil. My men had grown stagnant, but the Cadence had grown strong. Decisive victories were turning into near scrapes with destruction, and I knew when my last hunter died that my land was not long for this world.
With five kids, I assume the way they're finding is their bedroom.
Massive Chalice allows experiences like that one to flourish. Using a centuries-spanning war to weave its experiments, Massive Chalice is a game where accidents of birth, marriage, and being aged to death by eldritch abominations spreads ripples of repercussions across the decades and centuries. Here is a world brought to life through decisions that are wisely given time to breathe before they bear fruit. And it's a shame that experiencing those tales can be so intermittently tedious.
In Massive Chalice, you control an immortal ruler tasked with defending his nation against the omnipresent demonic scourge, the Cadence. In 300 years, a magical chalice will awaken and destroy the Cadence once and for all. But you must keep the kingdom alive until that happens.
And thus forms the basis of Massive Chalice's two major gameplay elements: grand marital strategy and turn-based tactical combat. In one half of the game, you must improve your land (through building population-supporting keeps, research-focused guilds, and military buildings), arrange marriages between the heroic bloodlines that keep the realm safe and thus ensure continuing generations of heroes, and guide the research efforts of the war. In the other half of the game, you lead squads of five soldiers (whose birth you might have arranged decades ago) into battle against the hordes of the Cadence.
The grand strategy portions of Massive Chalice provide its most organic memories, although, beyond the marital/breeding hijinks, the moment-to-moment interactions never equal the realization that decades of genetic planning (inadvertent or otherwise) brought you to victory or ruin. Heroes are divided by class, genetic traits, and personality types. If you marry heroes of the same class, they have children of that class. But if you marry heroes of different class, they have children of hybrid classes. And since the only heroes capable of reproducing are chosen by you, you can amass carefully constructed armies of diverse fighting forces that grow ever stronger or you can breed your ranged class to extinction because you forgot to marry any of them off.
Heroes have genetic and personality traits. They might be slow, or predisposed to having daughters, or small, or infertile. And (other than infertility), they can pass these traits on to their children. Suddenly, you find that you're producing an absurd number of men in your kingdom compared to women, and you remember marrying too many men with the "Produces More Sons" trait. Or you find yourself with those archers that can't shoot that I mentioned, because the house that was your archer factory features two spouses making kids genetically predisposed to being "nervous" (which lowers accuracy). Or by some miracle (because you know you didn't think about it enough), your melee families all have strong bodies and rarely miss. Watching your realm swing from crushing the Cadence to barely surviving because of bad genetic planning should be frustrating, but in Massive Chalice, it is more often amusing because you remember how you could have avoided the disaster.
But Massive Chalice extends you the invitation and then offers you a half-empty world in return.
There are also moments where the game presents you with choices and moral conundrums. Peasants riot in the West due to shortages caused by the war. One of your heroes kills a peasant trying to keep the peace. Do you sacrifice this potential hero? Or do you crush the peasantry? Multiple playthroughs reveal that the consequences of even these choices have an element of randomness, so you're always kept on your toes about how your decisions will play out. These decisions can have consequences that are more frustrating than fair, though. The last remaining member of a family can die in childbirth. Rational decisions can have catastrophic consequences, removing members of your Vanguard (your squad) for a decade--if not more--and then returning them with negative personality traits. There's a fine line between "keeps you on your toes" and "cruel," and Massive Chalice plays hopscotch with that line.
Some choices are more silly and endearing. Do you feed a wild ostrich? Do you go on a deranged hot air balloon ride? They add levity and personality to a game where genuine personality is abstracted at most turns. You have the option to put the Double Fine spin on the biblical Judgment of Solomon (though this time it involves placing a baby in your magical chalice instead of cutting it in half). You can force two feuding heroes to go on a walkabout around your war-torn land thinking it will cure their anger, only for them to return angry at you instead of each other. These choices maintain the random absurdity of the more serious choices, but they are less frustrating because they at least illicit a chuckle instead of bitter curses.
Way to pick the landing zone.
Where the grand strategy campaign falters is, sadly, everywhere else. The sheer randomness of the gene pool you're presented with at the beginning of the game means it's easy for one of the three core classes to be extinct by the time you build your second keep, just because the few heroes born into that class were cursed with the "short lifespan" trait. Or all of your alchemists have the reveler trait from the start and so you're stuck with a line of drunks for the next three hundred years and you never quite know when a member of your vanguard is going to wake up with a hangover and ruin your mission. It doesn't help that the game's ability to present information to the player is obtuse at best. I ran multiple saves of Massive Chalice before I felt I had a proper handle on its mechanical quirks (and then I ran several more as I began to grasp the complexity of the genetic interplay).
It's also impossible to discuss Massive Chalice's strategic elements without bringing up XCOM: Enemy Unknown, because its design is borrowed quite liberally from that game. You make research, marital, and building decisions and then fast forward through the years until something happens that requires you to respond. Regions of the map are attacked by the Cadence at the same time, and you have to choose which land to help, which sows "corruption" in the region you didn't help, which can then lead to the permanent loss of regions if you continually ignore their needs. Bits of fallen enemies can be used to research better weapons and armor. Remove the marriage and breeding elements of the game, and Massive Chalice would veer close to being Fantasy XCOM in a way that feels less like homage and more like an unashamed clone. The research, production, and macro-military elements are about as thin as a heroin chic model, and if you can keep your heroes alive, the strategy offers so few meaningful choices that it becomes impossible to screw things up beyond poor genetic planning. By the 100-year mark, research and building decisions begin to feel like busywork to keep you occupied between battles rather than important moments in the battle for survival of your kingdom.
When the game puts so much effort into creating a genetically diverse breeding pool of clashing and conflicting personalities, it's disheartening that none of it can be seen on the field.
On the battlefield, things only fare slightly better. Although there are a host of classes in the game, they're broken into three core ideas: melee, ranged, and control. You're free to mix and match your squad of five heroes however you see fit (I tended to stick to two ranged, two control, and one melee). And then you're loosed in turn-based tactical combat within the game's sprawling environments. But that's partially where the game's combat falls apart.
Massive Chalice's maps are huge. If you're moving cautiously around the map, you can waste minutes inching around the levels hoping to bump into the enemy. And whatever algorithm/design principle Massive Chalice is using to generate enemy layouts on these maps is comically out of balance. Combat missions range from easy walks in the park with monsters healthily spaced out to cramped spaces with monsters packed into a singular corner of the map. This would be less problematic if Massive Chalice's combat weren't designed around fighting enemies in manageable packs. Fighting large swarms at once is a recipe for instant death.
It's even more frustrating because the core loop of Massive Chalice's combat can be good. Executing feints and lures to manage enemy unit size and inventing fresh ways to counter the Cadence's deliciously evil ways to hurt you (including attacks that age you and kamikaze poison plant monstrosities) is endlessly satisfactory. Combat is simple: you're limited to a small suite of abilities and items, but there's a synergy to the way the classes play off each other. And you're given enough agency to execute plans and watch them fall together (or go hilariously, miserably wrong). Some enemy combat abilities are outright broken. One enemy can teleport you across the field. If you can't kill it before it attacks, it can wreck all of your careful tactical planning. The aging effect of another enemy is merciless in a game where aging and mortality are constant specters. The length of Massive Chalice's battles is an exercise in pop relativity; if you settle into the groove and the Cadence isn't spaced preposterously apart, it can fly by. But if you're stuck wandering around in an aimless haze, you'll feel every agonizing second of fights that regularly push past the twenty-minute mark.
For a game that places such granular mechanical focus on the personalities and genetic makeup of the heroes you produce, the writing and aesthetics of Massive Chalice never translate this in a meaningful way. If much of Massive Chalice is a less complex XCOM, your heroes' traits become a less charming Valkyria Chronicles. For instance, I didn't realize that one of my "reveler" heroes was hungover until he suddenly couldn't move as many spaces. Characters that are "strong-willed" (which means they're unlikely to get the traits of their parents) don't project any force of personality on the field. When the game puts so much effort into creating a genetically diverse breeding pool of clashing and conflicting personalities, it's disheartening that little of it can be seen in battle.
Ah. Nothing like deluded meta-physicists during wartime.
The heroes of Massive Chalice felt more real to me as mythic heroes of bloodlines--their indelible effect on generations of warriors not fully understood--than they did as the figures they cut in battle. In the grand strategy portions, they were part of families with house sigils and house words and adopted children. On the field, they were hit point boxes killing other hit point boxes and I couldn't care less about them as individuals beyond being tools for securing ultimate victory. The game's lifeless artwork did little to alleviate this problem. Although watching the members of your Vanguards or Regencies age and wither away until death was fascinating, the look of the heroes was devoid of detail, and left me with an endless trail of blonde/brunette/ginger men and women with caberjack/crossbow/alchemist claws.
That's ultimately Massive Chalice's most unfortunate shortcoming. It's a game with enough ambition and execution to spark the imagination, and enough organic entropy to let you suspend your disbelief about the families you help sire. But Massive Chalice extends you the invitation and then offers you a half-empty world in return. Massive Chalice's entropy speaks to me. The random chaos that one marriage can wreak over the decades is a mysterious well of excitement. But the flatness of its world and the tedium of several core elements of the Massive Chalice experience is a high price to pay.
Shadowy conspiracies, supernatural voices, and fearsome blizzards. Mass murder, wandering spirits, and glimpses of a world beyond our own. These are Kholat's ingredients--ingredients that could have comprised an enthralling story, and one that Kholat itself doesn't tell. This exploration adventure squanders its foreboding icy atmosphere on a nonsensical tale that mixes age-old cliches like secret experiments and government cover-ups into narrative mud. Trudging through this mud proves exhausting; every story morsel is another bog to traverse, and the impenetrable ending is pure quicksand, sucking you and the hours you spent to reach it into a vortex of nothingness.
Story and atmosphere are all Kholat has, making its poor storytelling all the more egregious. The "based on a true story" setup is promising, at least: in 1959, nine hikers exploring the chilly Ural mountains died in bizarre circumstances, inspiring years of speculation, along with numerous novels, films, and television inquiries. Kholat has you retracing those real-life hikers' steps from a first-person view, taking its cues primarily from games like Dear Esther in which your primary way of interacting with the world is to wander through it and read the diary entries inexplicably littered throughout.
This is what most Kholat screenshots look like.
I say "inexplicably," though I presume there is a reasonable explanation for why these pages haven't become sodden by the falling snow or blown away by the howling winds of Dyatlov pass. Kholat's final moments have the air of a grand reveal; the cryptic narrator makes a resounding declaration, as if he is providing an answer to the game's mounting questions. This is to be the "a ha!" that ties it all together, but after two entire playthroughs, I'm not sure I can tell you what all the questions are, let alone make sense of the narrator's answer. The clues are found in the pass itself, where metaphysical sights appear before you in eerie shrines and dark caves. They are also found in the diary entries left in the snow and tacked to trees, of course, which divulge confessions and weird science experiments in far more words than is necessary. In mystical stories like this, not everything requires easy explanation, but there's nothing to invest in when you can't make out a basic shape amidst the static.
You're left with snow, and lots of it. You cover a lot of uninterrupted space as you make your way around the pass, seeking the nine landmarks earmarked on your map. This map is Kholat's most promising aspect. The game does not feature a traditional interface; there are no waypoints leading you to your destinations, the map doesn't show you your current location, and you are given no standard quest objectives. Instead, you have a layout of the area, markers that show you the camps (that is, save points) and notes you have already found, and a sequence of geographic coordinates that indicate where you can find the vital landmarks. You journey forward based only on your reading of the map, and the occasional map coordinates that someone has scrawled across the rocks and walls throughout the region.
Ooh is something about to happen? Yes. But nothing interesting.
Navigation thus requires patience, thoughtfulness, and an appreciation for a measured pace. These aren't unreasonable things for a game to ask of you. However, Kholat doesn't progress at a pleasant adagio, but at an excruciating largo. The success of a slow pace rests on the impact of the moments that break it, yet such key moments are too rare, too broken, and too annoying to make exploration worthwhile. A few central revelations bring some percussion to the minimalist droning, including an event in which you flee danger amid a mass of glowing figures. The rest, however, prove problematic.
There are the ghostly silhouettes that roam a few of Kholat's areas, for instance, which kill you should you make contact with them. Sometimes, you collide with a spirit you couldn't have been expected to see; Kholat springs the entire mechanic on you without warning, and doesn't provide proper audiovisual cues to communicate when there is immediate peril. A couple of traps you couldn't have seen--or even suspected would exist--can have you falling onto wooden spikes and cursing at the 30 minutes you lost due to the infrequent save points. (You may also lose progress to the game's occasional hard crashes, an equally curse-worthy event.) Some ledges you are meant to drop down onto; other ledges of similar distance are off limits, and send you sliding into oblivion. "Gotcha" deaths are difficult to get away with in games, because they often feel unfair, but they can serve a purpose if used as a learning tool. In Kholat's case, there's nothing to learn from some of these deaths, because it isn't clear enough what you did wrong in the first place.
One of the bridges of Dyatlov pass.
In many stories, blizzards and the frigid cold provide a specific kind of terror, and Kholat's moaning winds cry out tales of lost souls that the game ignores in favor of shapeless nonsense. Its ideas reveal the game Kholat wanted to be, but its aspirations soar far higher than the game it became. What good is a mystery if you don't care about what it might tell you?
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