While it is still currently in closed beta and has only 14 heroes in the pool, it does not fail to deliver on all the fast-paced, back and forth action us veteran MOBA players crave.
As I entered the game, I was greeted by my guide who took me through the tutorial. Your first mission takes you through a series of obstacles carefully crafted to teach you the basic mechanics of the game. Here you take on the role of Caprice, the legendary female pirate lord from the high seas of Lyrie. The tutorial was very Dota 2-esque; the player controls a single hero and finishes a set of quests which eventually lead to a final showdown between Caprice and the Alchemist (an old man with an ogre for a pet…interesting…) However, it doesn’t just stop there. In fact, the game picks up where, in my opinion, Dota 2 failed; the player is actually guided into a match against bots where my guide once again shows me the ropes: this time on the battlefield of Strife itself.
The tutorial was very useful and noob-friendly, providing messages of alert whenever I have taken tower aggro and giving me tips on how to use bushes to my advantage. Having never seen a demo of the game, I got used to the different controls and unique mechanics within the first few minutes of playing the game just through the tutorial itself. Only time (and a larger player base) will tell, if Strife will truly be this beginner friendly but it seems like the tutorial does quite an excellent job at easing a player into the gameplay.
Even as a veteran MOBA player myself, I’ve found difficulty in adapting to the different controls across the various games of the genre. With Strife however, I felt myself plunged into the game with ease. This was mainly due to the fact that S2 had gone the extra mile to strip the game controls to its bare minimum and increase user customization without hitting the cog switch we’re all too familiar with. For instance, instead of rummaging through your settings page trying to find out how to lock/unlock your camera pan, just hit ‘L’ and you can toggle between modes. Players are also given the option to bind their own keys without hitting the Settings button; hold TAB + the undesired key and click on the desired key to replace it.
It is my first public match of Strife. No more bots, no more hiding behind my bald tutorial guide. It is time to put my newly adopted skills to the test. I wiped the sweat off my forehead and scrolled over the 14 heroes making sure I choose the right one.
Does my team have a support? Do we even need a support?
I clicked on ‘attack damage’, selected my hero (Hale) and proceeded to the ‘Pets’ page.
The use of Pets in the game is unique to the Strife universe. Each pet has a specific role and its abilities are tailored to fit this. Whether your pet is focused on adding movespeed to your hero or additional bounty for killing creeps, how successful your game will be is determined by your hero-pet pair and how you make it work.
Choosing the right pet for your hero will allow you to try different styles of gameplay; for instance, if you choose a pet that grants additional gold on creep kills and paired it up with a ganking-oriented hero, you could end up with a completely different style of play.
Pets can also be evolved once they have gained enough experience which will then grant the user the option to level up certain passive abilities the pet might possess. Think: Runes/Masteries but in the form of a cuddly companion.
The map is your usual MOBA map, having three lanes. Each lane protected by two towers before reaching the generator and finally, the opponents “throne” (which by the way, has the ability to attack). The gameplay is very fast paced due to the abilities being relatively spammable and the gold income that comes when either you or your ally get a lasthit (this is a unique mechanic that allows players to gain gold while in a radius as long as an ally lasthits a creep).
One thing that really sets the term “snowball” in Strife apart from its MOBA counterparts is Krytos. Krytos is a creature that a team can ally with after defeating the NPC that guards it. After acquiring Krytos as an ally, he will spawn in a lane and charge towards the enemy base destroying whatever that is in his wake and drawing creep agro as well (did I mention that his attacks removes the towers’ ability to attack?).
With Krytos on their side, teams are able to push and force a teamfight as the enemy will have to destroy Krytos in order to defend their base; this forces the enemy team to not only focus down Krytos but its allied team, who is also probably pushing in addition to the oncoming waves of enemy creeps.
Versatility is also one of the game’s strong points. Any one hero can be customized according to the player’s whim and fancy. Heroes in the game are designed such that the item choice (and as previously mentioned, pets) are even more important than the actual role of the hero itself; meaning that a player can choose to build a typically Magic Damage hero as more of a Tank (as is the case of Bastion, the Golden Child). This grants the game a plus point over the other MOBA games as there is less backlash from teammates who insist that a hero can only benefit from a particular way of play (many players of the genre can attest to this).
Strife’s in-game UI can get very confusing at times and it is very annoying to have to click on player icons (which are situated all the way at the top of the screen) to see statistics such as player items and kills+assists which are indicators to how well your team is doing. So having to bring your cursor away from the map just to see these stats can be very distracting especially for new players. The shop is equally cluttered and can be very confusing. It took me 3 games to find out how to sell an item due to the incredibly tiny trashcan icon at the bottom of the shop screen. This however, can be overlooked as the gameplay more than makes up for it.
One thing I do like about the UI though is the ability to hide/unhide certain information bars by using the ‘TAB’ button, allowing for a cleaner screen when actively moving around in the map.
Strife was and is aimed at the casual gamer. This means that the developer team over at S2 probably decided that the competitive side of things was not what interested them. Instead, they wanted a game that was both noob-friendly and fun. While I do see the potential for Strife to become a professional Esport, I doubt that it’d grow to the ranks of League or Dota simply because of the difference in difficulty level. For a game to thrive on a competitive level, an almost impossible skill curve has to exist within the game to separate the players who are talented enough to earn a living out of it from the players who just can’t climb the ladder. This is hard to come by in Strife due to the mechanics implemented by S2 that generally benefit beginners more than regulars. All of this is still up in the air though since the game is still in closed beta.
All in all, Strife is a dynamic game with a good art design that puts its predecessor, Heroes of Newearth to shame. The heroes are so versatile that there is never one specific build to follow and the game is so fast paced that the game is never dull. Although it will take some time for the game to build a competitive scene (if any at all), I don’t see it as a drawback in any way since the game is aimed at the casual gamer.
