It’s a nice, albeit still lackluster option, to escape the randomness of loot boxes. If I found myself truly smitten with a cosmetic, I also had the option to buy it outright, assuming they were in the purchasable rotation. Don’t get me wrong, I love being able to retry my hand again at the slot machine, it’s just a bummer that it hinders my ability to quickly unlock heroes. This time commitment was compounded when I was charged gold if I decided to re-roll any loot crates whose yield I was unhappy with. “Even if I was grinding quests all week for gold (the currency used primarily to earn characters), the time to unlock some of the higher-cost heroes like Malthael or Ragnaros felt like ages. It’s exciting and rewarding to be adaptable throughout a match, especially when you start factoring in the map you’re on and the enemies you’re facing off against. Each talent decision has strengths and weaknesses that are fun to consider, and that makes choices matter. But another equally compelling route instead focuses on the long-range, single-target poke damage from his Storm Bow ability. For instance, if I wanted to focus on Overwatch hero Hanzo’s Scatter Arrow in order to turn the enemy team into walking pincushions, there are talents that improve that ability. Every few levels you can augment your hero’s abilities (including choosing between two unique ultimate abilities at level 10) to best fit how you want to play during that match. In addition to each hero’s starting set of three skills, there’s a level-based talent system that deftly replaces the tried-and-true MOBA item shop, keeping you close to the action instead of forcing you back to base to purchase upgrades. Those are just a couple of examples, but most of these heroes feel vastly different from one another and remain consistently fun to play and experiment with across the board. “The same outside-the-box principles apply to the design of the StarCraft Firebat Blaze, who can set up a Terran bunker for allied heroes to hop into for extra defense, grab a flamethrower, and torch the enemy while holding a critical objective or choke point. When they’re firing on cylinders, the battlegrounds add to the fun, taking on a life of their own while helping keep the action peppered with interesting and consequential decisions. These tense and exciting-to-make decisions felt like they were a direct result of the map’s layout and objective design, which constantly pushed my team into making meaningful moves regardless of the results. I had to decide whether it was better to defend an already-captured point or aide my teammates in assaulting the enemy’s hold on the other. On Dragon Shire, a map where your team attempts to hold two control points simultaneously and then send a runner towards the middle of the map to take a base-sieging dragon form, I was asked to make split-second tactical calls that could make or break the game. Great maps like Tomb of the Spider Queen, where you race to collect and turn in gems to call down game-changing spiders, or Braxis Holdout, which is a fun blend of point control and intense base defenses against hordes of Zerg, pack a punch. The design of these battlegrounds is largely well thought out. Each battleground offers something special in both aesthetic and play style, which keeps things feeling fresh even after having played over a hundred hours. It’s both mechanically and thematically fun to run around a well-kept garden collecting seeds to grow a giant plant monster for my team to pilot on Garden of Terror, or to fight alongside angels and demons on the Diablo-themed Battlefield of Eternity map. Each of its 14 maps is built around a unique mechanic that moves the fight from the lanes to a special objective that becomes the focal point of every game. “Another distinctive design choice that works in Heroes of the Storm’s favor is its loads of map variety – a welcome change of pace in a genre known for focusing on a single sports arena-like map.
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