Multiplayer Mayhem with Crystals and Cursing! Zing!
When Danish indiestudio Pixeleap decided to switch from mobile games to PC games in September of last year, this was responded to by a variety of comments, ranging from “very brave” to “very stupid”. With BattleSouls, which was just released as ‘free to play beta’ on Steam, they try to make their mark in the already bustling PC indiegame sector. What seemed to be a fun to play game at first, quickly turned to be a bore if you want something substantial.
In BattleSouls, you and your team (Red or Blue, why does it always have to be Red or Blue?) have to destroy three crystals of the opposing team. In order to be able to damage these crystals, a central ‘inhibitor’ needs to be captured and held by your team, otherwise the crystals stay invulnerable. This might seem like it could promote a very strategic way of playing, but in reality it quickly turns into a race from the ‘inhibitor’ to the crystals and back. That is if you don’t feel like camping in the enemies’ base.
To add more strategy to the game, you can choose out of a variety of classes (heroes), before you start a game. Pick 3, and switch between them in the middle of battle. If you are a mage about to get into a melee fight, why not switch to the knight? And when you eventually take a beating, switch to the healer and heal yourself and your teammates. Easy as pie! Too bad there are no real skills that you can improve. You simply level up as a player, and that’s it. You do not have higher health, your spells do not become more powerful, even more so, the ‘classes’ only differ in health and the active and passive skill that you have. You can only buy visual ‘upgrades’ for your heroes. And obviously, these are behind a paywall.
In fact, once you have played a couple of hours, the game quickly loses its freshness. There are only a couple of maps, all in the same area and with the same design, and at the moment only one game mode, namely: destroy your opponent’s crystals.
Since this is just an open beta, a lot can still be changed before the final product is released. Therefore, rather than giving an overview of the positive and negative aspects to this game, I am going to list what the good things are, and what can be improved.
| The Good: | Need to improve: |
| + The game has a nice cartoony feel to it, especially the design of the ‘heroes’ | – More game modes |
| + Switching between classes can be very useful to adapt your strategy | – Better bot AI |
| + A good team can accomplish plenty of things in a limited amount of time | – Customisation of heroes after levelling up |
Provisional Score, 3 out of 5:
