I also had the chance to play the PC version of Motiga’s Gigantic. If you can get your hands on an invitation ( register on the website), you can download and start playing right away. Smite is in closed alpha right now, with release planned later this year. It’s where the heart of the genre’s complexity lies, and it has the same appeal as building a Magic: The Gathering deck. When I played League of Legends for a couple of months, I barely scratched the surface of the item system. With the auto-buy option enabled, the game will spend your gold on gear that best fits your chosen deity’s skill set and role.Īt some point, you’re likely going to want to turn this off, learn what different items do, and start tailoring your favorite god to conform more closely with your play style.
In most MOBAs (Smite included), you can only purchase new items when you return to base. It’s good to enable as you learn the map and the core concepts, though. After a few games, you’ll probably want to turn it off and experiment a little bit. The auto-level option assigns points to the four different skills at each rank-up without you having to worry about it.
I strongly recommend that if you’ve never played a game in the genre before that you take full advantage of the auto-level and auto-shop features. Where the game does excel is on-boarding new MOBA players. That means you can’t “Leeeeeeroy Jenkins” into a pack of enemy gods and expect to survive for more than two seconds. It’s important to note that despite visual similarities to more straightforward action games, Smite is still a MOBA.Īll of the heroes, even the tankiest bruisers, are squishy. The effect is a familiar third-person action view that makes the game a solid fit for a controller. Whereas League of Legends and Dota 2 feature an RTS-style top-down view, Smite puts the camera behind the player. Hi-Rez’s deity-focused MOBA is a better fit for console than some of its competition. That’s about to change.įirst up is Smite. The genre has a firm foothold on PC, but hasn’t made much of a dent on console. At PAX this weekend, I had my first opportunity to go hands-on with two MOBAs headed to Xbox One.