The healing sheep, the drunken huntress, the shooter granny, and the gruesome schnitzel beater!
As in a MOBA or hero shooter, we get to choose a hero before each round, which we then take into the arena. Battlerite currently has 15 to choose from, which are categorized as “ranged”, “melee”, and “support”. As is customary in such games nowadays, the heroes are all quite outrageous. Need some examples?
The mystical healer Oldur looks like a sheep with a steel mask, kimono, and a giant hourglass.
The huntress Taya has the same hairstyle as Tank Girl, drinks like a fish, and rides a wild boar!
Iva is a scrap-collecting old lady who brings a whole arsenal of weapons into battle, including shotguns, rocket launchers, and Gatling guns!
The hefty berserker Rook always carries a club as a second weapon, a beef club! In case the man gets hungry. Additionally, his warhammer suspiciously resembles a schnitzel beater.
We can level up our heroes through victories and unlock new outfits and victory poses. Additionally, we receive special chests through character progression that work just like the loot boxes from Overwatch. They contain cosmetic items like player portraits and weapon skins. If that’s not enough, players can buy more chests with real money, but this does not provide any gameplay advantages.
Skills for every occasion
Each of these heroes has five standard skills that can be used at any time and are limited only by varying cooldowns. Four additional abilities, however, require energy, which we can recharge either through attacks, support actions, or collectible power-ups. Two of the energy skills are alternative and stronger versions of regular abilities, the third skill is a special attack, and the last ability is our “ultimate”, which consumes all energy but hits really hard! A well-timed ultimate can possibly decide a game!
Our attacks and actions mostly involve so-called “skill shots” that we need to aim carefully. If you miss, you’ve wasted a valuable skill and have to wait out the cooldown. There’s no auto-targeting here! Each hero always has a skill for mobility, one for controlling enemies, and one for survival.
Is that all?
Battlerite has only recently been in Early Access, but already thousands of people play it every day, and the game even led the Steam charts for a while. The Early Access version currently costs €19.99, but the release version will be free-to-play and is expected to be released in early 2017.
At release, there will also be more arenas, heroes, and game modes. Those who acquired the Early Access version will, however, have immediate access to all heroes in the free-to-play version as well as all champions that will be released in the future. The Early Access version already gives a very finished impression; we haven’t noticed any bugs or balancing issues, only the German translation is occasionally missing in the skill texts.
Jürgen says: I actually stumbled upon Battlerite by chance when a colleague from GameStar happened to have a key left and I was the first to respond. So I just tried the game out, and what started as “just a quick look” turned into a gaming marathon that didn’t end until 4 a.m. The fast and wonderfully uncomplicated gameplay simply leads to that infamous addiction of “just one more round.”
I particularly liked that each hero plays differently, and I get along very well with some while I can’t even get a single kill with others. A sign of good and varied game design. And sure, €20 is quite a lot of money for an Early Access game, but anyone even slightly interested in action-packed PvP battles can do nothing wrong with Battlerite!
