It should be no secret how much Heroes of Newerth I play and how much I love the game. I enjoy the tense ganks, the frantic action of a team fight, and how everything can come crashing down if you make a simple mistake. Smite, from High-Rez Studios, is able to take all of said action I know and love, combine it with a bit more casuality of, say, League of Legends, and present it in a third-person camera view that turns a strategy game into an action title.
Here’s how a traditional MOBA title works: teams of 5 will compete to destroy the enemy base. Before that, they have to destroy the towers in their way. Before that, you have to kill the NPC creeps that continuously spawn, giving you XP and gold. Smite doesn’t work exactly like that; putting far less emphasis on the creeps and more emphasis on, well, killing enemy towers, bases, and other players. While the concept may seem odd to fans of HoN and DoTA, once you play it things turn out quite well.
Let’s be clear about one thing: like any MOBA game, those with an experienced and farmed player will undoubtedly destroy their unfortunate foes, but the mechanics of Smite do their best to balance the game regardless of experience and skill difference. Every attack your hero will make, even auto attacks by ranged heroes, are skill shots that need to be aimed. Even the developers, who were controlling PC stations that were hooked up to the HD TVs for the audience to watch, had issues lining up some of the abilities due to the opposing team dodging incoming attacks.
Add in the fact that the game borrows from League of Legends in having there be no gold penalty upon death and your barracks/inhibitors, which are actually called–no wait, they are Pheonixes, respawn after a certain time of being dead, and it helps to balance out gameplay. If the other team is to win, they need to earn it full heartedly.
Let’s go back for a second. Smite‘s theme is all mythological based; every hero is based on a god or goddess in ancient mythology, hence the Pheonixes being barracks and your “base” actually being a Minotaur that can attack you back. As you can expect, each god has powers that make sense with the specific god; Neptune does water attacks, Zeus thunder attacks, so on and so forth.
What’s most impressive about Smite is the game’s art direction. It has more of a cel-shaded type approach than realistic, but it leads to some gorgeous environment visuals, which is both quite impressive for the game’s alpha state and disappointing when you take into effect that some character models aren’t up to par. But, again, the game is in an alpha state with a beta state hopefully coming up soon.
The bottom line is this: there’s still plenty of strategy to be found in Smite and the camera angle adds more of action feel to it, ramping up the pace while keeping importance on strategy, placement, and teamwork, staples of the MOBA genre. We’ll be getting more time with the game tomorrow and hopefully we can snag an interview or two. There was a lot of enthusiasm at the booth and we caught the bug.
