Recent reviews by Sleelan

As of February 2024, the subscription is getting an almost twofold price hike in some regions that doesn't seem to in any way reflect currency exchange rates to USD. What was a reasonable bandaid solution for the insane entry level price point for this game, just became much less reasonable.

Which is a shame, because on the DLC front, Paradox has not improved anything. One of the recent DLCs was supposed to contain content for specific few countries (England, France, Ming), but of course came bundled with generic gameplay features and improvements that are making playing any country smoother. So there is still not pick and choose, it's all or nothing, and now you're paying double the price to get it.

I was a bit hesitant to recommend this after it supposedly left the early access. Version 1.0 was a release in name only, as a lot of bugs were still left in the game, ranging from incorrectly working perks to players and objects falling through the map to their deaths. But so far the developers haven't stopped patching the game and fixing some of the bugs, even though they did slow down their pace. So I'd say that it is worth your time and money, especially if you have even one friend to play it with. It's still fun and 90% of the game can be played in a pretty laid back manner, so the questionable balancing decisions don't rear their ugly head until much later on. Just keep in mind that this is essentially still an EA game in all but the name only.

One of the recent updates introduced a brand new Paradox Launcher, an unnecessary bloatware that's only there to display a bunch of animated ads. However, since it took over the option of configuring your mods, you are still more or less forced to use it, hoping that it doesn't break your DLCs, doesn't randomly crash (which it does a lot), or just randomly decide to say working in the background once you close it, eating 15% of your CPU until you realise that it's still there (usually by Steam telling you that "the game is already running", despite the actual game process being long gone).

And as if the feature of launching a launcher from your steam launcher wasn't exciting enough, it also broke a lot of mods, meaning that about 80% of workshop is now stuck in some previous version, with the mod creators unable or unwilling to put up with this nonsense. Thanks Paradox!

Do you know the joke about hell being the place where cooks are British, police German and it's all ran by the Italians? This is what this game feels like.

Battlerite is a late guest in the party of MOBAs/Arena Brawlers/ARTses/DotAlikes/AoS Clones that has been oversaturated for about five years already. This has not discouraged the Stunlock Studios (the creators of an eerily similar and pretty solid Bloodline Champions from 7 years back) however, as they decided to add another body to the pile with their second project, this time made in Unity. One could ask just how much can you innovate in the genre that had seen everything. The answer as it turns out is: not much.


This game copies everything from other titles, and I do mean everything. I could let it slide in the name of distilling down the pure essense of the genre, if it copied the best aspects. But it does not. This gorey mash copied the worst aspects of economy from Leauge of Legends and Overwatch, leaving a free to play title with all but 6 characters locked behind a grindwall/paywall (but graciously providing the "buy all for 25 bucks" option borrowed from Smite), while still having the lootboxes from the latter title (because of course a game released in this era must have lootboxes) with all the drawbacks and none of the improvements. Getting duplicates for less than a quater of the coin value? Check. Common-Rare-Epic-Legendary rarity system? Check. The exact same $50 for 60 chests ratio? Check. A brand new factor of getting a skin/weapon skin for a character you don't even know? Check.

The last aspect is especially infuriating. In Overwatch, if you get a legendary skin for a character, you can go ahead and use that skin right away. In Battlerite you can drop multiple epic and extremely rare legendary cosmetics, just to be forced to play your old tiny roster of characters. Oh and by the way, those cool legendary skins I mentioned? Some of them are not purchasable with the "cosmetic currency", they are purchasable with coins - the same resource you need to buy expensive characters, split into multiple tiers (from 950 to 6k) just like in LoL. Of course, that whole aspect can be taken away, for only 24.99. It's almost as if half the game was not designed to be free to play and copied from a full price title. Hmm...


But hey, let's ignore all of that. Perhaps you don't care about the skins, don't mind playing 1 character over and over again and/or bought the All Champion Pack. How does the actual game feel? How does it handle?

First of all, the developers promised a "fast, action packed" experience, that takes the "most interesting aspects of MOBA genre" and boils it down to quick 3v3 matches. To translate from corporate marketing to English, it means no gold, no items, no level progression. The only way to alter your character's performance from the baseline, is to select 5 "battlerites" out of the pool of 20. You do this pre-game, you cannot change them. They are a small passives that alter one of your abilities in some way. It can be "deal 4 more damage", or "get extra 10% range". Or it could be "instantly refresh your multi-target long range nuke that chunks enemies for 25% of their maximum health and stuns them". More on balance later.

The end result of this approach is that there is no variation. Every game feels the same, plays the same. Your enemies might be different, but you hardly notice. Your hero is the same and does the same. In your "main" gamemode, there is no counterpicking, because it's a completely blind match of 6 players without the ability to adjust what you're playing. Nor can you adapt to what the enemy is by buying correct items, because there are no items. I'm aware that at the top 1% of players people might be able to shuffle the small passives around and adjust best they can. But as a beginer, no such luck. You are thrown into the game as the same starter hero into the same small map over and over again.

And you would think that this at least makes the game easy to follow and relatively approachable. But even here it falls flat. The first hurdle comes in the form of movement - it rejects the standard RMB movment, in favour of Smite-like WASD controls. Why is that a case in an isometric perspective game like this, in an engine that can handle mouse driven commands, I cannot tell. But they went with it, and the 8-directional movement system will run you into walls and allies on more than one occasion before you get used to it. And you better act fast, because you still need to learn your abilities. All 9 of them

Yes, I did count the "basic attack" there, but this game has the most complicated "basic" attacks out of all games I've played. Not only is it prevented by silences, but all champions have some different gimmicks to their respective ones, like healing, reloading, bouncing etc. So yes, 9 abilities. And the keys? Well better get something to write it down, because here goes - LMB, RMB, Space, Q, E, your first energy spender that is not the ultimate as R, your ultimate under F (?) and finally a combination of any two of the above with Shift as your secondary energy spenders. Can't tell you which ones, because every hero has a different ones. Yes, it feels as if the developers had some conflicting ideas as to what exactly makes the game "approachable", stripping down all the long term decision making and progression in favour of an erratic, purely skillshot based mash that has less targeted abilities than Smite (!), but more keys to press from the first second than DotA 2 does in a 90 minute Roshan fight.


But even then I did not discard the game comepletely. I thought that maybe as I play more and grasp the mechanics (by which I mean managing 8 different cooldowns) I will begin to enjoy myself more. But it was not meant to be, for one simple reason.

This game is imbalanced as hell. You would think that in the enviroment emplyoing only 30 champions and absolutely no items or level prograssion. it would be easy to keep everything moderately even. But apparently it's a task that Stunlock Studios are incapable of performing. The heroes in this game come in 3 categories:

1. Ranged heroes with a long range 40 damage+ nuke (most champions have 200 health) or mass healing, that are also provided with multiple dashes, stealth and/or countering moves,
   
2. Melee heroes with upwards of 5 dashes, everlasting crippling slow and self healing, while also having a stealth/parry move to avoid any retaliation.
   
3. The bad ones.

My first purchased champion was Varesh. I dropped two epic cosmetics for him and liked his Dark Templar-esque appearence. I spent all my coins on him, opting to not purchase two cheaper ones (as I mentioned, tiered character costs). I then went into the game and got destroyed. Over and over again. My skills dealt little damage, I had extremely limited mobility and no crowd control. Shifting through the Battlerites I quickly realised that his kit is supposed to work around using his E ability, a long cooldown, small aoe delayed explosion that dealt puny damage, while snaring enemies for 1 second. All the meanwhile I was being sniped by invisible gunwomen or offscreen icelances, or jumped by an invisible frog that stunned me on will before jumping out of my range. When I was not being destroyed by the token samurai character with 4 dashes and a better Spiked Carapace of Nyx. After a few 0-3 loses, one of my teammates told me something I already knew. This is why nobody plays Varesh.

Perhaps it was the extreme case. Maybe in a competetive setting The Meta is different. I don't know. But at the end of the day, I did not have fun. And I see why many people would feel the same.

A game worth 10 bucks. For 1, you'd be crazy not t.

The game where your mosed used key is the "restart" button.

If you like games that make you feel, then this is ideal title for you.

Feel what? Well that depends on how you play the game of course.

Start as a king of Scotland, marry off your son to the Queen of Castile. Rub your hands in glee thinking that you have 2 kingdoms to rule now. Then watch in despair while your plans shatter because you did not read that while you have "Gavelkind" in your homeland, Castile has introduced "Seniority". Oh and you just got assasinated by your brother. Game over.

10/10

It's decent if you like dying.

While the HD version is not amazing (there is no 16:9 in lower resolutuion, and full HD resolution means massive zoomout), the game itself is not any different and still worth your time, and the low price listed here.