#Best new moba pc games 2018 windows#

For one thing, I needed no other character but Viktor. Having played the game on PC, I can tell you that the hundreds of hours I’ve spent on Overwatch in the last couple of years prepared me for Paladins in ways I wasn’t expecting. They’re leaning much harder into, and doing more creative things with, specific MOBA genre tropes than Blizzard ever have with Overwatch. Indeed, that seems to be Paladins big point of difference. Your heroes even get mounts to allow them to move around each map much faster than on foot, another MOBA trope that distances Paladins from its competition. They seem much shorter than in other games however, with no match I played in typically lasting longer than about four or five minutes on average. Hybrid seemed to be the mode that popped up most for me, with levels that felt like they were constructed much more in the lane-centric, MOBA style than the flank-heavy layouts Blizzard prefers. Matches play out on maps built for specific game types, like Payload or Hybrid. In terms of how Paladins plays, if you’ve played a shooter like this you should have a good idea already. The same goes for support hero Talus, who appears appears to be a cross between Midna from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Ico.

There is a character named Pip who looks like someone traced a picture of Ratchet and stuck him in the game.

They crib from other games too, some entirely unrelated to the team or hero shooter genres. There are several others.īut Hi-Rez don’t stop there. The physical and mechanical similarity to Torbjorn does not feel co-incidental. You have Barik, a short, bearded man that deals in shields and turrets. You have Androxus, a character that blatantly steals Reaper’s style but is more of a mechanical blend of Reaper and McCree. You have characters like Russian grunt Viktor, who plays very similarly to Soldier: 76. There are characters in the game that are a one-to-one parallel with Overwatch. With that in mind, let’s start with where there is some overlap. It would certainly be easy to call it that, but it would be inaccurate and, I think, reductive. While Paladins does hew very closely to Blizzard’s model - every part of its artwork and character design seem to have been crafted with one eye on the Overwatch style guide - it does still manage to differentiate itself from Overwatch enough that it can’t be reasonably called a rip off. I don’t, because it’s actually a lot more than the sum of any of these comparisons, but I might have to anyway. I don’t necessarily want to spend this review harping on Paladins connections to its direct competition.

#Best new moba pc games 2018 windows#

It focuses specifically on the Windows PC version of Paladins, while the review’s second part will focus on the Nintendo Switch version. This review represents the first half of a two part review. When Hi-Rez’s team shooter/MOBA hybrid Paladins went into early access a couple of years ago, a major source of amusement among the gaming community was in how closely, sometimes shamelessly, it resembled Blizzard’s Overwatch. They are very good at looking at successful multiplayer games, distilling their most enjoyable components and putting their own spin on them. Hi-Rez Studios is a developer that has built a successful portfolio by doing exactly this. There is a trend in modern AAA game design of pinching the best ideas from other games and building on them to create something new.