MOBAs or Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas have grown in popularity in recent years. The success of League of Legends was an excellent combination of micro transaction use, meta-game content and very deep gameplay. And with its success, we’ve seen more games sprout up including Valve’s own DOTA 2 in an attempt to capture the fan base.
While basing games on LoL’s style is great, the problem with LoL is that the game has a very high learning curve and a community with a low tolerance towards newcomers. With Awesomenauts by Romino Games, they wanted to create a game with similar depth to other MOBAs, without the high learning curve. And they succeeded… for the most part.
Future Wars:
The basic concept of Awesomenauts is taking the core elements of a traditional MOBA and putting it into a 2D game, as opposed to the isometric style seen in other titles.
Taking place in the far future, mercenaries lead robotic armies across planets to destroy their opponents’ base.
As with other MOBAs, Awesomenauts features a meta-game designed to unlock new content the more someone plays: new characters, arenas and items (more on that in a minute) become available. Like LoL, all characters are available through play, with new costumes purchase-able with real money.
After a few minutes of playing, you’ll be able to see the big differences between Awesomenauts and other MOBAs. Battles are resigned to 3 on 3 fights making an Awesomenauts match last around 10 to 20 minutes, as opposed to hour long matches of LoL and other MOBAs.
Instead of controlling characters similar to a strategy game, Awesomeanuts plays out like a 2D platformer. Each character in the game has 4 key areas that differentiate themselves from each other: Two special abilities, a primary attack, and health and movement options.
Defeating other players, robots or neutral creatures will yield solar, which is the game’s currency. Characters don’t level up through experience as in other MOBAs, but instead can purchase upgrades in the form of items to each area back at the home base.
But the big difference in design between Awesomenauts and other MOBAs are the item and meta-game systems and how they are more streamlined compared to other games. Playing LoL, the game featured an extensive list of items: defense items, situational, offense and many more. Many characters live or die by the items that you buy for them, changing their dynamic radically.
This in turn raised the learning curve dramatically, as not knowing what items to buy was just as bad as not knowing how to control your character. LoL’s meta-game consisted of three talent trees that players earned skill points towards by leveling up.
Along with runes that applied buffs to characters that had to be bought in the store. As you can probably guess, all this combined presented players with a lot to learn making an already complex game, even harder to fully grasp.
Awesomenauts combined the item and Meta game system into one mechanic. After you have leveled enough to unlock it, the item bar becomes available. As we talked about earlier, each character instead of leveling up, buys items that act as upgrades. With the item bar unlocked, you can choose what items are available to buy.
Awesomenauts’ 2D view point makes it a lot easier to grasp what is going on when the combat starts.
Before the match you can customize each row of the bar that relates to the four aspects of each character mentioned earlier.
This allows you to decide how your version of that character can improve in game.
Do you go for making skills deadlier, or give them more utility? You can only have three items per row preventing any one character from becoming unstoppable.
By keeping the Meta game simple, helps lower Awesomenauts learning curve and the quick matches make it a viable option for people new to MOBAs. However, the problem with Awesomenauts is that the cracks in the design start to appear if you try to get better at the game.
Casual Confusion:
Awesomenauts was clearly aimed at casual and new players to the MOBA scene which by itself isn’t a bad thing. But the simplistic choices and design decisions hurt the game having a long lasting appeal for moderate to expert players.
For people wanting to learn more about the intricacies of the game, they’ll find that Awesomenauts is lacking in information. Like LoL, each character falls into a different class base on its functionality. However the game doesn’t give clear information about how the different classes work and what they are good against.
The Item Bar is where the bulk of the meta game and character growth comes into play.
This is an issue as the game definitely has the same system as other MOBAs where certain types of characters are clearly superior to others.
This is where the concept of “Pick” and “Counter Pick” comes into play at high level MOBA games. Where the team will attempt to pick their team based off the choices of the other team.
But in Awesomenauts, not only can you not discuss at team selection character choices, but you can’t see the other team’s choices until the game starts. And just like in other MOBAs, a match can be over before it began if the other team picks a better composition.
Unlike LoL, Awesomenauts doesn’t have a huge staple of characters yet, making it very easy for certain team combinations to come out on top. The rate of adding new champions is very slow compared to LoL which is both good and bad. It’s good since the game won’t overwhelm new players, but bad in that it gives people who have been playing the game awhile not a lot of options.
The game’s bullet point of drop in and out match design sounds like a blessing at the start, but becomes a curse the more you play. The reason is that the AI in Awesomenauts is just woefully behind that of a human player. Joining a game as the only human on an AI team against an all human team is just a lost waiting to happen.
As a game for people new to MOBAs, Awesomenauts is a great way to introduce them to the genre without throwing them into the deep end. However both Awesomenaut’s design and content are lacking to keep people playing once they have master the game. Hopefully the developers will continue to add to the game, as its different enough to stand out compared to other MOBAs.
