Battle Souls – First Impressions

When you first play Battle Souls you get taken over by all of the bright and shiny art work.  The backgrounds and characters just jump at you. I enjoy when games such as this have tons of color. I feel like it adds to the experience that you have.  This game is very unique.  The best way I can describe it is that it’s a mix of Happy Wars with a touch of Smite.  The object of the game is to control the center crystal and then destroy three of your opponent’s castle crystals.

As far as the game play goes, it seems like it’s going to be absolute mayhem once people start swarming the servers.  You have load-outs based off of three characters of your choosing. There is a fairy that’s like a white mage, a Knight with a dash and slash attack, a Wizard that shoots ice and fireballs, a female pirate that sounds like a man (I though this part of the game was hilarious), and you also have a Grim Reaper black mage with one more character to choose.  What makes this game different is that once you have selected what your load-out will be and you are in game, you can change class at any time with the hit of a button.  This brings a whole new element to the game that makes it a frantic race to control the map gems and stay alive.ss_c66ca111c203c6e3c63b6781988f8a3376a87533_1920x1080

For example, if you want some range you may want to play as the wizard, however if all of a sudden you are being rushed by 5 opponents, you can quickly change to a pirate and mow down the horde with cannon balls clearing a path for your team to take over the center gem. The heat of the action will be in the gem areas of the map. I spent hours mowing down the opposing team who were trying to take over the center gem and in turn making my way to victory. The action is fast paced and you have to keep your head on a swivel since there multiple routes to the center gem on some of the maps.  On the differently designed maps you can get flanked easily since there’s only one route to the gem that you will need to take over. As mentioned before you need to control the gems in the map before you can damage a gem at the enemy castle.  There are also power ups to collect on the map and once you take over a power up gem your team has a performance boost for a short time.  I enjoyed how this element of the game was time based for the power ups as that creates some type of balance for both teams. Other games that I have played which are similar to this let you keep the power up till you die. In a game like this I could see that creating a huge balance problem, so the timer is a well thought out addition.

During my play time I didn’t experience many bugs at all.  The game play was very smooth and I was at a constant 60 FPS or over. This is good sign of things to come.  The controls also felt very tight and twitchy like arcade arena shooters are. I feel that this twitch type of speed fits well for a game that has been designed for high paced battle because when you are mobbed by a horde of wizards and knights you are going to want that twitchy speed to evade and toss in your counter attacks.ss_e43bb5d30c84cdcba0ad4c9175829029eec82a17_1920x1080

Some of the character models are a bit more beefy than others though however I am not going to reveal those here since I feel this is something each user should find out on their own.

One thing I would like to see is a ending timer. I felt that some of the matches just took forever, and an example of this is one particular match I was in took nearly a solid hour to complete. This is just way to long for a match to go on in my opinion, especially if you have little ones running around that need your attention every few minutes. If you had created a custom match I could see it lasting that long, however each match should be cut down to maybe to 15- 30 minutes at the most  for a standard generic match.

For those folks that like Happy Wars and Smite this game will satisfy your MOBA fix.  For the others that are on the fence about a game in this genre or have never played a MOBA, it id definitely worth your time taking a look as it may be that diamond in the rough you have been looking for.

Be sure to check out Battle Soulson Steam when it drops on May 12th, as it is one of those games you are going to want to experience for yourself.