This past weekend, Blizzard unlocked all heroes in Heroes of the Storm. I always enjoyed playing Heroes of the Storm, but I had more than my fill of MOBA gameplay through Smite. My friends and I casually played Heroes of the Storm for a few months following its release, but after the hype wore off, the game fell off of our radar.
Heroes of the Storm is known for its vast array of Blizzard characters for players to choose to play as. The catch is that the heroes are inaccessible (apart from a small, random, rotating selection of free heroes) unless you pay with in-game currency, or buy outright with actual money.
Because Heroes of the Storm is a free-to-play game, it can get away with charging players to gain access to certain characters. However, unlike Smite, which has a one-time fee to unlock all of the god/heroes in that game, Heroes of the Storm has no such thing. While you can unlock the heroes with in-game gold, that would take a very long time to do so; meanwhile, paying real money to unlock all the heroes would be costly as the heroes range in price from $3.99 to $9.99.
So when Blizzard ripped the price tags off of the heroes for a weekend, I made sure to dedicate some of my free time to checking out some heroes I have never played before.
As it worked out, my daily quests involved playing eight games, in addition to playing games as an assassin and support character. I browsed through the roster (which has exploded in size since I last played), and I ended up selecting Uther and Jaina. I typically like tanky-healers (Kephri was my favorite character in Smite), and Jaina seemed like an interesting, range-based assassin.
I played my first set of matches with Jaina. I was happy to see that along with the expanded roster, Heroes of the Storm has a handful of new maps that were interesting in their own ways. One of the highlights of the weekend came on the map that features the iconic, zerg rush, from the Starcraft games.
On that particular map, a swarm of insect-like zerg aliens rush at the opposing team’s base. It’s a very devastating event, and one that’s quite terrifying to see coming your way. As one such rush headed toward my base, I made my way out into it’s direct path and summoned my ultimate ability, a blizzard that covered the lane in freezing sleet. The zerg army was frozen in place. My ultimate ability worked….until it didn’t.
The zergs quickly thawed and proceeded to devour poor Jaina Proudmoore.
I fared a little better with Uther. As a support hero I was highly encouraged to provided life-giving heals to my teammates, and as a tanky character, I could get right into the thick of things while keeping teammates alive. I really enjoyed playing as Uther. I didn’t have any particularly hilarious moments, like I did with Jaina’s fateful zerg rush incident, but I felt like I played better, and was more of an asset to my team.
Overall, the free weekend was a nice distraction from my Series of Unfortunate Events marathon, but it failed to pull me back into being eager to play Heroes of the Storm, regularly. I didn’t have a bad time, but there were multiple matches where I found myself bored. Heores of the Storm desperatly needs a surrender option, at least in casual game sessions. In some very one-way matches I would just idly attack minions in lane, waiting for the enemy team to destroy our nexus. Those were not fun matches. The thing is, it wasn’t even trolling that ruined the game (I surprisingly encountered zero trolls over my weekend with Heroes of the Storm), it was bad matchmaking, where my team of four assassins and a healer would go up against a team with a better balanced team composition.
Heroes of the Storm will likely be one of those games that I don’t play often, but I play enough to warrant keeping it installed on my hard drive. The game is just one that I have to be in the right mood to play, so when I’m in the mood to play a top-down MOBA, I know Heroes of the Storm is there for me.
[Heroes of the Storm official website]
