Review – Heroes of Newerth (PC)

I’m very conflicted about Heroes of Newerth. It is a game that is rewarding but ephemeral, deep but sometimes boring, and both fun and frustrating. I can love it one match and absolutely hate it in the next match. It is both a team focused game and a self focused game. It’s even hard to categorize HoN, as it is a real-time strategy where you control one unit most of the time, but it also has RPG elements like leveling, collecting gold, and buying items.

Players begin by selecting a map and a variety of game options, including the size of the teams. Once the game fills up with the desired number of players, the game displays a stable of characters that rivals the most ridiculous Marvel versus the Universe games, and each player picks a character for that match. The match will begin, players are given some starting gold, and then troops will start spawning in each lane and heading towards the opposing team’s base. Players get money for landing the last hit on enemy troops, players or some neutral monsters that are located between the lanes on the map, as well as experience. Each level rewards the player the option to level up among the four skills that each character possesses. Players do not carry over their character, experience or gold into the next match. To win, you have to (likely) topple each tower on the way to the enemy base and then destroying the main structure inside the base.

That’s the basics of the game. The controls aren’t hard, especially for any RTS veteran. You click and use hotkeys to activate skills and items. But the depth comes in the variety of characters and the role each character can fulfill as part of the team. Some characters are useless until much later in the game when they’ve acquired more items and levels. Some characters are there to support your teammates when they engage the enemy players. Just to give a sense, the “mini” guide for all of the whopping sixty two characters is this long.  There are many in-depth discussions about team composition, what pairings work best in each lane, and how to win team fights given compositions. The depth is stunning and I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface. HoN was played competitively in the Beta and continues to have support as an eSport for this reason.

The upside of the game is that it is very rewarding to kill your opponents in order to get gold and to take gold away from them. The downside is that if you are losing, your team will turn into vulturous jerks. Whether it is actually anyone’s fault, at least one person on a team will start calling some other teammate names and start being mean. If you are going to try HoN, I will give you a pro tip: /ignore add <name>. It has saved me from reading a lot of stupidity in my games. It is baffling that even if you join a Public game labeled specifically for new players, you will still get these whiners trying to ruin the game for one specific person, or sometimes for the entire team. It is a horribly unforgiving community and it really detracts from the experience, and I don’t understand the extreme hostility. Seriously, the HoN community makes Xbox Live look mature. Thankfully there is a profanity filter, but my ignore list is filling up quickly.

I feel part of this is the fault of S2 Games. Even their official website is completely marketed towards Defense of the Ancients veterans as there is no explanation of what the game is and does not introduce new players. Of course, this hostile culture also existed in Defense of the Ancients, so they can’t take all the blame.

It’s a huge compliment to the game that despite the rampant elitism and bad manners in the game, the game is still fun. It combines skill with cleverness, daring escapes with knowledge. It has built-in voice and many improvements upon DotA. Most notably, the stats tracking system is very helpful. One person leaving on a team usually means inevitable defeat for that team, so tracking if people disconnect in the middle of games is a great idea. In addition, wins, losses, kills, deaths, and numerous other statistics are tracked. S2 Games has provided in-game voice chat, which is great if you’re playing with friends, but not so great sometimes with strangers. Thankfully you can mute each of your teammates individually if they’re getting annoying. The shopping system has been greatly improved and it’s now much easier to buy the components that combine into more powerful items. The graphics have been improved, and sound-wise they’ve add the option for turning off the Unreal Tournament inspired announcer. I leave it on because it feels great to hear “Bloodlust!” in that deep, booming voice. The music is also pretty good.

HoN also includes a smaller 3v3 map called Duskwood Vale, which is enjoyable but is not played competitively. It can be good for new players to start with this map in order to avoid the confusion of bigger battles, but it’s also more oppressive if you happen to be facing an opponent that is a lot more skilled than you. The character imbalance is also more apparent when the team sizes are smaller.

There are two modes for play: Ranked matches, which have specific options chosen for you, but includes matchmaking and separate stat tracking. There’s a smaller pool of characters to choose from and is always a banning draft, where the captains of each team can ban a total of four characters from being chosen, and Public matches, which are more casual games and the match creator can select the options. One of the more common options is Easy Mode, which means troops and towers are a lot weaker and the games are a lot shorter.

DotA was one of those games that I kept going back to, and I suspect Heroes of Newerth will be no exception. If you’re looking for a deep game that you can spend months learning, then I’d recommend picking it up – but only if you have the patience to endure the intolerant culture.