Game Review - Paladins
Summary:
Paladins: Champions of the Realm is a free-to-play, competitive, objective-based, first-person shooter, multiplayer game for PC; currently in beta development by Hi-Rez Studios. The same guys who made the very popular game called SMITE which is a third person MOBA. Paladins has the same feel that SMITE does but mixed with a lot of concepts from other games, all mixed in one. It has the feel of smite with the art, maps, movement, general mechanics. It feels like Overwatch or Team Fortress with its FPS game modes and select characters to choose from. Those characters also have specific weapons/skills that can't be changed. Just like DotA, HotS, LoL, and most other MOBAs, you level up and progress within the game and resets each game. It also adds a mix of Hearthstone too! Each time you level up you get a "card" which gives you a permanent passive bonus to your character. Could be general stats or something that makes one of your spells much more powerful. Get this, you even unlock "chests" to discover NEW cards that can be used while leveling up. To be honest, at this stage in development, its not that bad and pretty fun.
Champions:
Lets start with the champions that are available to play. There are no actual "roles" per se but each champion definitely has their pros and cons for specific use cases. This is unofficial but I have deemed the roles below for each champion. I think fits for now to help portray each character's job.
Note: Links navigate to character gameplay videos.
I consolidated each champion profile below to easily see them all:
Game Modes:
As far as I can tell there are 2 game types. Siege and Capture Point. Capture Point is similar to Capture Point in TF2 except there is only 1 up at a time and first to 5 captures win. Pretty simple. It ends up being a team death match though as you sit on the point with your team defending (mostly Fernando) and first one to get 100 point ON the point, captures it. If both teams are on, nobody gets points as its contested. This just ends up being a constant respawn and run back battle until 1 gets the point. Seige however is interesting and much more fun. Each team gets a turret that spawns in the middle of the map and it automatically makes its way to the enemies base where there are 3 gates that need to be destroyed. The enemy team will try to attack it every second it is alive, hopefully before it reaches any gates to do any damage (where the champions can also attack the gates, but only if the turret is alive). This alternates each between the teams, once the turret dies, the other teams turrent spawns and everybody races to the other side of the map. Its really fun.
Gameplay:
I got some general gameplay of myself playing with a mix of champions. These are unedited steams from YouTube Gaming (where I stream from time to time). I plan on taking this footage one day and making a review videos that can be included in the blog post and they can complement each other.
Hope you liked my review. Thanks for checking it out! Let me know what you guys think about this game in the comments or any feedback. I still have beta keys available for anyone who wants to play! Just let me know!