GameOn - MOBA Games - Rise of Immortals

Official Site: http://riseofimmortals.com/

Source: Youtube Channel IGNentertainment

It's been a while since I've done a GameOn and have chosen to talk about Massive Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games this week.  It's a fairly new genre and is not officially called MOBA but is used to describe any game that plays similarly to the globally popular Warcraft 3 custom campaign map "Defense of the Ancients" (DotA).  In a MOBA, there is generally two teams consisting of players taking different roles to fulfill a need to win a team fight.  Throughout a match, both teams try to push their own army into the opponent's base and destroy the main core to win.  What's unique about MOBA games is that its core concept is similar to a tower defense game, plays similar to a top-down Action-RPG, and originated from an RTS custom campaign map which retains some of its elements in the genre (MOBA originated from a Starcraft custom campaign, DotA made it popular).  There are dozens of characters to choose from, the dynamics of the game changes all the time with team compositions, players level up throughout a match and learn new skills, buy items to become even stronger, and participate in mini-boss fights in the map.

With the success of DotA, many developers wanted to have their take on the new found genre without the limitations of the Warcraft 3 engine.  One such game to emerge is "Rise of Immortals" and heavily based on the theme of Mythological beings from various cultures.  The game's art style and characters remind me of "Demigod", another MOBA game that was fun but unfortunately suffered from unbalanced gameplay and clunky user-interface.  I liked how there was a 3-player cooperative mode to play and practice on a new character in the game.  In most MOBA games, players are often tossed into the fray and had to learn everything along the way which made for a steep learning curve (it's not really like that anymore).  Rise of Immortals wanted to make the game a bit more involving for players since those who played DotA would know that nothing was kept and a player starts fresh at level 1 every time.  In Rise of Immortals, players can earn currency to purchase items that slightly increases an ability of a character to give a bit of advantage and allow a sense of progression like an RPG would.  During a match, the player can rotate the camera all the way around and play at an angle they feel most comfortable playing in.  The game is still refining itself as all online games tend to do, and here are some things they hopefully improve on:
-The character roster is rather limited (a little better now than when I tried it)
-Gameplay is still imbalanced (some characters are useless while other clearly have an advantage)
-Movement reaction is sluggish or delayed (Not sure why, but there's a slight delay in movement when clicking)
-Less login bugs (A lot of players seemed to have trouble logging in)

It's been a while since I've played the game and I feel like playing it again once more just to check out the new characters.  It's free to play so anyone interested shouldn't hesitate to click on the link on top and try the game out.