Here's my review as of 5 public games played. I urge you not to get freaked out about the negative comments I'm giving and provide constructive replies instead. Also, I know that this is Beta so spare me the "This is beta wait til its out" comments. Criticism exists to improve Betas not to drown it.
About the gamer in me (hero based games only):
- I've been playing Dota long before Icefrog took over kept playing quite alot over the years, got involved in many local tournaments and organized some myself. For those of you whom are familiar with DOMNet, will know this to be true.
- I tried LoL and simply didn't find it to be my style. Dota is what I like so the logical decision was to try HoN.
- I started playing HoN since Beta and I'm still playing it today casually.
My computer specs:
i7 2600k, Sapphire Radeon 6970, 8GB Viper Extreme, SSD, PX2370 23" LED
My comments about Dota 2:
Misc
- Game size: 4GB is simply too much. I honestly don't know how or why it's so large, but it's quite annoying for someone in lebanon to download the game.
- Game requirements: This is something that should be handled, when i try to find a game, 9 out of 10 matches, some players are simply unable to load the game and we end up getting disconnected. Perhaps this is also an internet issue for some people but i presume it's the loading time rather the internet issue.
Pre-Match UI
- Game menu: It looks decent, I think they did a great job with it. It could use a little tuning especially on the part where they seem to use browser components rather native components.
- Match selection: It's decent as well, I like the display and the way the game provides you with the progress of the match lookup.
- Hero selection: It's simply aweful, perhaps there's another way to view the heros but that 'Card' style view is not friendly at all. I would prefer a
Grid based view, with details (like the card view hero details) available on mouse over or on initial selection (before clicking pick). The top display of the currently hovered on heroes or the selected heroes should have a tooltip that shows the hero selected. I know that you can click and see what the hero is, but that shouldn't be the case. I should be able to quickly glance and know what heroes are picked.
In-Game
- Environment Graphics: Graphics are fine, it's what you'd expect from a game in 2012. I have no problem running the game at max resolution, max details and everything without a slight hiccup.
- Hero Graphics: They are extremely weak. They look like small blobs and they are very bulky, and the colors are not harmonious with the environment. Perhaps they wanted it this way but that doesn't do justice to the effort placed on the environment. I would choose to lighten up the character colors and have them
mix with the environment.
- Hero Animation: All heroes look constipated in the game! Agility heroes do not 'act' agile.
- Attach Animation: This used to be a key power of a certain hero and right now, they all seem to have the same animation.
- HUD: Incredibly cluttered and things are all over the place.
-- 1: Hero statistics : Very large, It shouldn't be this big, it can be reduced by at least
half.
-- 2: Abilities tooltips :
Small grey text?
-- 3: Item images: Not crisp at all! very very blurry. Additionally, when you're moving items around it seems like you're dragging an image not an item. They should rework this, it's very ugly.
-- 4: Shop menu: It's not friendly at all, the shop graphics are quite ugly and the shortcuts are, well,
hidden? (
HoN Shop, P.S: this screenshot seems rather old)
- Gameplay: It's not bad. If we're comparing dota 1 to dota 2 then it's a definite improvement. They should however take into consideration what they were lacking in dota 1 and apply them to dota 2. The most notable issue that I think they didn't tackle, is the intelligence heroes scaling. (HoN solved this with:
Spellshards, you can find it in Combative, first item)
I have more things to say but i'll leave them for later. All in all, I didn't find it quite hard to adapt to Dota 2 bar some delays i faced finding things on the screen.
Dota 2 is promising I just hope they don't release too early and make sure to look at the existing games and take ideas from them as well.