Awesomenauts’ old familiar grind

Posted by on May 4, 2012 in Reviews

Awesomenauts is a mostly unimaginative re-tread of the all-too-familiar Defense of the Ancients gameplay. Pick a lane. Push with your creeps towards turrets. Maybe jungle a little. Kill the other team’s dudes for a leg up. Endure, endure, upgrade, endure, endure, upgrade. Once you get a few levels on the other team, push a little harder. Endure some more. Endure. Push. Upgrade? Nope, not just yet. Endure. Kill. Endure. Now upgrade. Win. Or lose. Like Ronimo’s actually awesome Swords and Soldiers, Awesomenauts is a compressed experience, so a game will typically take 20 minutes instead of 40 minutes. But beyond the fact that it’s a gleefully cartoony 2D sidescrolling game, Awesomenauts does little to distinguish itself from, say, Demigod or League of Legends.

After the jump, six men enter, three men leave

A match is always and only three vs. three. Since there are only five characters, they’ll quickly become familiar. Note the conspicuously empty slots for DLC characters. The publisher filed for bankruptcy the week before Awesomenauts was released, so those slots are likely to remain empty for a while. But you get some variety in the five characters by choosing from a slate of skills before you play. You don’t get these skills from the start, but they determine what you can buy over the course of the match. This stands in for the uncertainty in a game like League of Legends with its 100+ characters. When you face — or play — Voltar, will he be a dedicated healer, a drone swarmer, or a guy who hunkers down by tossing out a turret to help his team? Is that enemy Lonestar packing a rampaging bull, a spray of dynamite, or boosted firepower? Is a cloaked Leon lurking on the map, or is he going defensive by dragging you into range of enemy turrets? And is the guy playing Yuri going to be able to take advantage of his jetpack or will he be easy pickings? Where League of Legends poses these questions in terms of what characters show up and what gear each character buys, Awesomenauts offers the broader, more meaningful, and ultimately sleeker choices appropriate for a 20-minute match.

There are only three maps, but they have distinct layouts and features, such as jungle beasts for easy healing, a deadly aquatic worm threatening the bottom lane, and plenty of shortcuts, jump pads, and ambush opportunities. You can play practice games to learn the maps, but you won’t be able to practice on the third map for a while, since it’s locked pretty deep into the progression system.

Yes, locked. Most of Awesomenauts is locked behind a drawn-out grind. You’ll unlock all five characters quickly enough, but you won’t get access to their skills and therefore the game’s variety until you’ve spent literally dozens of hours leveling up your account. Dozens. Think about that. Are you willing to spend that much time with a game this modest and familiar? And are you willing to play against people who’ve unlocked the advanced skills? Because you will. Awesomenauts is ultimately an online or not-at-all game. You can play skirmishes against not very good bots, and you can even do it locally with friends (with, but not against; Awesomenauts has no support for local head-to-head matches because of the way everyone shares a minimap). Like many Defense of the Ancients clones, this is about going online and head-to-head against another team.

And here’s where it’s the usual hit or miss situation, especially for an unproven game like Awesomenauts that might never find an audience. When I first started playing with a friend, we were matched with teammates who didn’t really know what they were doing. The left bumper lets you issue a general command, but that’s not much help when someone keeps attacking turrets single-handedly. That’s going to happen. It’s the nature of online, especially in the early days of a game. And unlike League of Legends, with five players to a team, every Awesomenauts player is one sixth of the match and one third of your team. A little ineptitude goes a lot further.

But then we found a third player who actually found smart ways to work the map. He stuck with us. He alternated between lanes as needed. He was cautious, but aggressive enough. We won. The three of us continued on to a new game (to its credit, Awesomenauts easily plays you into and then through matches) and won that one. Then we went on to another game, grouping a healer and a couple of powerful heavy hitters, all of whom moved forward with our AI army, plowing easily through turrets to the enemy base. It took us less than three minutes. Then we won another game in less than three minutes. And another. And another. If we’d stuck with it long enough, we eventually might have found some sense of balance. Maybe later that night. Maybe a few days later. Maybe in a week, depending on what kind of community builds up around the game. It’s the nature of online matches in a game like Awesomenauts that it’s only going to be as good as the people who play it.

And if that’s your bag, you’ll feel right at home here as you log the dozens of familiar hours on your way to unlocking the full game. Choose a lane, endure, upgrade, push, endure, upgrade, push, repeat. I forget, does familiarity breed contempt or content?

3 stars
Xbox 360

  • Barac Wiley

    And that’s why I don’t tend to go in for competitive multiplayer. Human players may be less predictable than AI, but that’s a very double-edged sword. A -good- match with players of equivalent skill level but divergent tactics can be immensely entertaining. Maybe if you invest a lot more time than I’ve ever been willing to invest playing the same game over and over again dealing with all the times the match is lopsided or otherwise tedious, unpleasant, or frustrating, you can consistently find that kind of match because you can hang with the crowd that gets really good at the game and plays all the time. Maybe. Me, I run into the ends of the random-human-variance spectrum that suck in one direction or another way too often to enjoy myself, and then I go back to singleplayer, or coop, where I know what I’m getting into from the offing.

  • Anon

     Persistence inheretently precludes it from being competive. A prerequisuitve is that anyone is on an even playing field. No starting with aces every round.

  • Barac Wiley

    In that case, no multiplayer game is competitive, since even with matchmaking algorithms there is no guarantee of an even matchup due to differing player skill levels. And it’s that element of PvP multiplayer that turns me off, regardless of whether persistent elements skew things beyond the straight skill to skill ratio.

  • Porousnapkin

    I’m a little confused if you’re condemning the whole genre for feeling repetitive or if it’s only this game that makes you feel it. Awesomenauts felt a lot more consistent from match to match than League of Legends does for me. It could be because everyone was low level and hadn’t unlocked all the abilities to add variability to the matches (I only got to level 20). I play League of Legends with the same 4 people regularly so the majority of our team is a pretty consistent makeup, but the games feel a lot more variable than the matches in Awesomenauts I played. I think that’s exclusively because the cast is so much larger and more varied.

    It’s not entirely fair to compare a game that’s been building its champion base over the last few years to one that just launched, but I wish this game had launched as a free to play game on PC so I could expect it to receive a similar amount of developer support. Even if the publisher hadn’t folded, getting patches into XBLA games is way too difficult and slow for developers or players to wait for it to get interesting (Monday Night Combat failing on console is a great example of this).

  • Superslug

     player skill is not part of the playing field.

  • Barac Wiley

    If you say so.

  • superslug

     Sure, it is why sports have grades. Competitive games are starting to take player skill into account though. SC2 has been pretty successful with its ladder. I am a terrible player and am  constantly matched against other terrible players. LoL tries but is less successful. 1/3 or 1/4 games feel even and those games are great. The crushing victories either way are not great.

    I agree though, it is a problem that needs solving.

  • tomchick

    I’d say it’s a pitfall of the genre.  The formula is pretty well established at this point.  Any game that just taps into the formula without some twist is going to come with a certain feeling of ennui.

    The advantage Awesomenauts has going for it is that the formula isn’t as well represented on console systems.  Monday Night Combat and, uh, anything else?  And given how widely ported Swords and Soldiers was, I imagine Awesomenauts might eventually find its way to the PC.  Well, pending whatever’s going to happen with the publisher’s bankruptcy.

  • superslug

    I have only played one game in the MOBA genre does it vary less than one hoard mode to the next or team death match?

  • tdc

    You sir, are obviously QUITE under read, and don’t deserve to publish articles for anywhere. There are SIX characters, and one of the publishers went bankrupt, not the developer. So figure that one out, publishers don;t MAKE games, they publish them.

    Although, the community really does ruin MOBAs.

  • Guest

    The twist is that it’s a platformer! The controls and moment-to-moment gameplay are completely different from other games in the genre. How can you just gloss over that?

  • Shieldwolf

    “Awesomenauts does little to distinguish itself from, say, Demigod or League of Legends.” How about it’s available for the XBOX!   Is Awesomenauts better than DG or LoL? Not a chance, but I can’t play those on my Xbox.  Since I don’t have a computer that can play those games, guess what I’m going to be playing? While I won’t disagree with your view of the game I think it is biased on the fact that you have access to those games. 

    Right now I’m enjoying it. I’ve probably played 60 games easily. They’re quick, fun and even when I’m losing it’s awesome to get in a game and cause as much damage as I can before it’s over.

  • winner dark souls

    Yeah, you would think that if this reviewer really DID grind as much as she said she did then she would realize there were 6 characters. And I don’t think it was just a typo on her part because she states that there are only 5 characters twice in the “review”. Also, Voltar can’t “hunker down by tossing out a turret to help his team”. No character can create, or even repair turrets. If they could they would be quite powerful.
    This is the first review I’ve read on this site and it will probably be the last. I’ve been looking for a new gaming site but I’m afraid this one has little credibility.

  • winner dark souls

    There are 6 characters, not 5. And this game is at least 4 stars. I suspect this reviewer didn’t actually spend a whole lot of time with the game, because not only did she get the character count wrong, but also she says that Voltar can create turrets, which indeed he can not. Nor can any character.
    Most of the skills and characters and maps can be unlocked within a few hours, not the dozens that this reviewer implies. Perhaps she just wasn’t good at the game; or maybe she had just gotten her nails done and couldn’t hold the controller correctly. I don’t know. I’d just recommend you download the demo to see for yourself what a good game this really is.

  • winner dark souls

    There are 6 characters, not 5. And this game is at least 4 stars. I
    suspect this reviewer didn’t actually spend a whole lot of time with the
    game, because not only did she get the character count wrong, but also
    she says that Voltar can create turrets, which indeed he can not. Nor
    can any character.
    Most of the skills and characters and maps can be
    unlocked within a few hours, not the dozens that this reviewer implies.
    Perhaps she just wasn’t good at the game; or maybe she had just gotten
    her nails done and couldn’t hold the controller correctly. I don’t know.
    I’d just recommend you download the demo to see for yourself what a
    good game this really is. :)

  • SpazCamel

    Awesomenauts is a great game, and has a more casual feel compared to LoL and Dota. ‘Does familiarity breed contempt or content?’ So repeating a game style is copying… So theres only allowed to be one game per genre then it seems.