With the steady rise in popularity of MOBA games over the past few years, it’s no surprise that game developers and publishers are looking to make a MOBA of their own. At the moment, it is undeniable that Dota 2 and League of Legends (LoL) are at the top of the ranks when it comes to MOBA games, and competing with these two giants may not be a good idea especially when you’re meeting them head on. This is what makes Strife by S2 Games and Asiasoft a rather interesting kind of MOBA game.
We’ve told you several things about Strife in the past, but now that the game has finally entered closed beta (CBT), I finally have enough grounds and basis to give you an actual game review.
Gameplay: Bringing something new to the table
Like most MOBAs today, Strife pits two five-player teams against each other with the general aim of destroying the enemy’s main structure —in this case, the Crux —while preventing their own structure from being destroyed. To do this, each team must come up with a plan to take the enemy base. The number of strategies a team can use varies with the possibility of combinations and match ups that can be made out of the game’s hero pool.
In a previous article, I mentioned why you’re probably not going to suck at Strife because it’s deliberately made easy to pick up. One way S2 Games simplified the game was by limiting the hero pool to just fourteen characters, which decreases the amount of hero knowledge the MOBA novice has to pick up. The smaller hero pool does limit the number of combinations you can make per team, but since each hero can play multiple roles, you can make two or more strategies using a single line up.
Another of the usual problems I encounter with other new MOBA games is that they barely bring anything new to the table. So why would I leave my current MOBA game for what feels like a reskinned version? What I like about Strife is that it dared to make more significant changes.
The shared gold system, for instance, allows for a more relaxed game for support players. You can focus on harassing or ganking the enemy hero without worrying about where to get your gold or survivability items. Although there are numerous advantages to this, as a support player, I found myself missing the challenge of finding resources for myself in Strife. I feel that playing support may have become too easy.
Although Strife may have made the support role a bit too easy, the game’s smaller maps and faster lane rotations make ganking a whole lot of fun. This is great for players who love hunting for solo kills or setting up ganks and team fights. The smaller map also means a greater chance for you to encounter and engage the enemy, but also forces you to be more careful if you’re not ready to take up fights just yet.
Strife brings a lot of welcomed changes, but one new addition that I’m on the fence about is the crafting system. I believe game items should be designed to keep some sort of game balance. If there’s anything I’ve learned about gaming, someone out there is going to find a way to exploit something and Strife’s crafting system is just too tempting. I assume that with their experience, S2 Games knows this, too, though I have yet to see how much the crafting will disrupt the game balance.
To give you a better idea of the gameplay, here’s a video of my first game:
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