Gaming Heroes of Newerth Review

Ok, I actually thought this was a fair review of the game as a HoN player.

But regarding the -

"One thing that does rankle though is the fact that your $30 game code, purchased directly from S2, is attached to a single in-game account, rather than a master account under which you can have multiple aliases as in MMOs. This means that when you’re finally ready to step up and play the game properly, you’ll still be stuck with the stats from those 0/10 drubbings you received when starting out unless you pay an extra $20 for a second alias. In our opinion that's a little exploitative."

You have no idea how necessary this is.

Was In beta from the beginning (about 10 months before release). The Ratings/Stats system while awesome was completely broke at lower levels of play because of Smurfs. People making new accounts to deliberately keep low to steam roll new/lower play gamers. You think the learning curve is hard now but it was impossible when every game (unless you had a decent host) would be filled with people that were FAR from being classed as 'noobs'. There had to be a way to make a new account but it had to be off-putting so much that you wouldn't get smurfs.

There are already a handful who have been willing to repurchase the game just to do it, but compared to 1-2 every game in beta its been alot more fun to game.

Smurfs broke the game - the $20 sub-account fixed it.

 

^^ Agree totally.

Plus you can always host your own games when you start off and inspect peoples stats to get a good idea if they are a good match for you or not. Or as previously mentioned by someone, Only join "No Stats" games to start off with.

I think the things HON got marked badly for are easily avoidable.

 

Simply: Boring!

 

While I thought the account system a bit explotative, I can see the benefits vs smurf accounts. The real area we marfked this game down on though was the lack of tutorials and the ludicrous learning curve. As I say in the review it'll take you 48hrs of play time to try every hero once; thats a lot of game time to invest to learn the basics.

 

Embed for those who missed it. Earbleeding dreadful indeed.

 

I understand totally. But for me that's part of the reason i like the game so much and maybe partly why i think the game is doing so well.
If i start playing a game and I'm utterly crap at it there's nothing i want to do more than play it over and over and over until I'm good.

 

http://www.honcamp.com/viewpage.php?page_id=1

This site gives recommendations on item/skill builds and how best (subjective) to play each hero. It also has a quick, 30-second read on each hero that might help players greatly.

 

lol all the games with "noob" in it are just trying to farm new players for stats, no such thing as a noob friendly match in HoN unless its private and you know everyone.

 

if you were great at dota you can be great at this

like dota is requires many hrs of practice andlike dota it has no offline mode

 

thanks for reviewing it. This game is best if you have some friends to play with and once again its a brilliant LAN game.

 

Having played HoN beta and playing LoL ongoing, I like LoL a heck of a lot more. In my opinion it is more polished and streamlined to start a game and get playing in a short amount of time. The gameplay also flows a lot better and the user interface is quick and easy (item buying is way better). That being said the fact that I also haven't spent any money on it is great, that way if I ever get bored of it then I am not wasting my money. I should also note they are updating and releasing a new hero on a pace of about every 2 weeks right now. So all in all I think LoL deserves a second look review.

 

this is Hon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ_LMk2qClY&feature=related and thats not a 6, this review has mo idea on competetive play or games with "better" players, the competetiveness off this game is huge and the game is very likely to become part of Esports so please... dont believe all u read, try it... enjoy it and love it.

 

If you'd have bothered to read the review rather than knee jerking at the score:

But as extensively covered in the review, reaching the competitive "fun" level you describe will takes dozens of hours of investment through a period where you're not going to have a very good time. Can HoN be awesome? YES! Do you have to wade through hours of flaming and defeats to conquer the learning curve and get there? That's a yes too.

 

Unfortunately there will always be bias towards either "Heroes of Newerth" or "League of Legends" since they're both competing for the same market. Personally, i'm one of the latter.

I tried HoN back when it was in beta after playing a couple of games in LoL, my personal thoughts were:

- The graphics are obviously much better in HoN, however i personally preferred the more simple cel-shaded-esque look of LoL, HoN feels too "dark" imo a la Diablo 3 whilst LoL reminds me of Torchlight.

- HoN didn't seem to be as accessible as LoL was when i tried it out. Both games have Tutorials, but LoL had Practice Matches you could play against bots meaning i could take my time easing myself into the game mechanics and experimenting with champions.

- I noticed the same thing a lot of other people did when starting, whereby there are loads of games labelled for "Noobs Only" which appear to be newly created accounts which exist solely to noob bash. Suffice to say i found it rather off putting. I admit that the same thing occurs in LoL but since it's all either Practice Games (so it's up to you), Matchmaking or Prearraged Teams, the games does a fairly good job of balancing your team's skill and level after a few games. I'd even admit that the matchmaking in LoL is flawed in the sense that since it increases a Prearranged Team's effective skill level when finding suitable opponents, when i go solo'ing i find that i'm generally of higher skill level than the rest (up until a few more games later and it balances me back).

- As stupid as it sounds, i also preferred LoL because they didn't unlock all the champions at once for freeplay. Instead they have a rotating list of free champions for each week, which gives players a chance to try out different champions that they may not want to risk "purchasing/redeeming". With HoN, this point coupled with the lack of Practice Bot matches meant that effectively i'd have to play through over 50 proper matches in my own time to find someone i liked whilst subjecting my teammates to my experiments. Unfortunately i find the sheer amount of initial choice in HoN to be a downside for newcomers.

Finally, my overall opinion is that HoN is probably a much better clone of DotA than LoL is, however unfortunately that comes at the expense of having DotA's steep difficulty curve. However i personally find LoL to be more accessible to newcomers (especially with the whole Free to Play thing) and it still scales well when you get towards the higher more competitive level.

As a previous poster suggested, i also wouldn't mind a second look at League of Legends when it releases properly (i.e. Season One comes out with ranked play) since Bit-tech's initial review suggested that it was an incomplete game at the time (and it still is i guess), however there seem to be more features and enough to warrant it a second look IMO.

And for all those who are interested, i started playing LoL, just over a month ago and on my US account just currently turned Level 30 (the higher) with about 300 games played. Meanwhile on my EU account i'm Level 11 with about 20 games played. I don't mind solo queuing but i do also play quite a few pre-arranged team matches now. Anyone interested in either playing with or discussing the game, there's a thread in the Gaming Forum here. =]

 

I have to admit I'm a little disappointed with this review. Only because it clashes with my own personal opinion. I have played both LoL and HoN and have found the following;

League of Legends:
I find the champions very balanced each with there own strengths and weaknesses. Example Annie hits like a truck but has no escape or slow abilities (not including summoner spells (13 extra spells which you may choose 2 of before entering a game, giving you 6 abilities all up)) and a small health pool. Another example is Alista who isn't the hardest hitting champion in the game however he has more life than Iron Man. Jax is another Champion who, at the high end levels of a game hits VERY hard but can be quite tricky to play. A good Jax is a well played Jax.

Also because LoL is free, you can play the game with the unlocked champions (8 champions unlocked for a week, then 8 different ones the following week) and play to earn Influence Points (IP) which can buy a champion if he is no longer available the following week (example 256 IP points for a win, Alista costs 1350). OR you can spend $10US and purchse Riot Points (RP) and buy champions with that (example $10US = 1380 RP and Alista costs 585 RP). So it gives you an incentive to continue playing the game.

The player base are actually quiet friendly. Often I'm playing a game and I'll get slain for example, type in /all chat "nice work man" and they often reply with "next time you get the jump on me and see how we go " as an example. Basically very friendly. Winners or Loosers, they always type "gg".

Heroes of Newerth:
Played this also and found a number of things very different about this game. Firstly it is VERY unforgiving to the first time DotA gamer. Playing LoL you can practise with bots but never found this option in HoN. Me and a mate tried HoN for the first time when it was still in Beta and it took us a few minutes to figure out how to ad each other as friends so we could play a game. When we finally figured it out we joined a practise game but with real players.

I never played this game long enough to give an indepth review however I did notice the graphics were very nice. A lot of people complain about the graphics of LoL but if graphics are the reason you play a game then I assume they never played the original DotA as it would have never been up to scratch for them. Gameplay wise I found HoN to be hard to control, the items VERY confusing and the enemy creeps were actually quite hard to see (k which ones are mine?).

The Champions were very balanced again like in LoL all with there own strengths and weaknesses. One thing I found however is the higher level you are, the harder you hit (obviously). But in HoN.. they hit REALLY hard. Basically, a lvl 20 pyromancer can easily take on 2 lvl 18s. In LoL the same thing applies however if you are not geared properly, you're done for. What I'm saying is I found it was a lot easier to be strong at a high lvl in HoN that it is in LoL. If the team you are playing in HoN are a couple of lvls higher than you, you are done for. In LoL if they are 4 lvls ahead you are done for. It really depends on the situation (champions, items etc) but I found in HoN the higher lvl you are, the more chances you have of pulling off those 2v1 situations.

The player base? Well... Me and my mate were raged at HARD! "wtf are u noobs doing omfg we have noobs in our team GG". Basically if you do something wrong, you are called out and you know about it. A lot of the time we found ourselves the subject of abuse from team mates (admittedly we were screwing up a bit but hey we were trying to figure this game out) and from opposition. "nice try noob" when failing to kill an enemy champion. The player base were extremely leet and didnt give us much reason to continue player to be honest.

Conclusions:
In LoL you can work your way up with your summoner profile to get Masteries (much like talent tress in WoW) to give the champion you select that tiny advantage, and runes also (think enchants and gems in WoW) giving you an edge in your own play style. Remember your opposition can do the same thing meaning its all about play style. So I found LoL to be far more customizable with hundreds of different ways to play.

In HoN, you pay $30 and everything is yours. You are thrown into the deep end. If you don't know how to play then better find some people who don't to join you otherwise you will know about it. The champions are all very straight forward and keeps the feel of DotA strong, where's LoL is the next step in DotA development inho.

So basically,

Heroes of Newerth = DotA with nicer graphics.
League of Legends = DotA v2. New champions, new things to discover, different way to play.

If you're a hard core DotA fan, HoN is your game. If you're a DotA fan and want something new, LoL is your game. If you are a first time gamer at the DotA scene... LoL is also your game.

Don't flame me, these are my own personal experiences.
DotA is the winner on the day

 

LAN PLAY? I was going to pass on this due to the high learning curve and abuse from people you don't know. However, this could be interesting to a bunch of new players in a LAN environment no?

So according to Aider LoL is the one for newbs to check out. I'm cofused though can't you buy the entire game of LoL also? Oh its a collectors pack.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Legends

How do these games compare to Demigods? I bought that last year but haven't had time to really play it.

 

I've never played Dota first off so i was new to the genre. When Bit-Tech did a review of LoL i decided to try it seen as it was free, i played 10 Games and then tried HoN as i had more friends playing HoN. I have since gone back to LoL and stuck with it.

Aider sums it up pretty well, i think if you are new to the Genre then try LoL seen as it is free to play, because like Bit Tech mention in the HoN review, this Genre as a whole has a steep learning curve, you don't want to spend $30 to find out it's not for you.

The communities are both rather hostile but once you progress people seem to become friendlier.

As everyone else has stated HoN is more for the Dota purists but the LoL review is now out of date, however although LoL has progressed significantly since the Bit Tech review, untill Season 1 and ranked games are released (in the next 2 months) i don't feel a review should be done yet, as the game will change significantly when those features are implemented.

 

after playing both clearly
League of Legends > Heroes of Newerth

Here are the reasons why LoL rules and Newerth fails:

1. Free to Play versus Pay to Play - why pay $30 to get an activation code to be able to get into the thing when there are perfectly nearly identical alternatives that are free?

2. Free to Win versus Pay to Win - after paying $30 you'd think you could win without paying additional money but oh no Newerth requires you to pony up ever growing real world coin to keep up adn the one who spends the most of the most awesome gear wins every time. When I play LoL I am not playing gimped Heimerdinger who couldn't afford to buy a wrench.

3. Large population. Because of the above two reasons the LoL population will continue to grow which means never having to play against the same people and never having to wait very long for a match. HoN also only has 1 map while LoL has 2 - I'd expect because they claim to be customer focused and players are asking for new maps so there are likely more LoL maps coming soon.

At the end of the day Hon=Full of Fail keep your coin and wait for the lack of cash flow to point their game in a less fail direction.

 

game is now free to play
hon is more gank heavy than lol