When I played Petroglyph's Rise of Immortals on the Personal Computer during its beta stage sometime in July of this year, I was not impressed. I was too spoiled by League of Legends to care much about the game at the time and perhaps I was the problem instead of the game itself. It didn't help that the queue time to actually play a match was extremely long back then - we are talking about a half hour wait here, which is extremely unbearable - so I didn't stay too long playing it. The game was officially launched last month on September 12th and it was even able to creep into Steam's free to play line-up late last month, complete with Steam achievements. I soon decided to download the game again on Steam and it had been sitting in my hard drive ever since. Tonight, I decided to check out the game again and you know what, Rise isn't that bad of a multiplayer online battle arena game.
It's really hard to mess up the MOBA formula, unless you are Land of Chaos Online.
If you are not familiar with the MOBA genre, it's basically a team-versus-team game where you start off by strengthening your character on the battlefield with the ultimate goal of destroying the opposing team's base. I am not going to lie to you, the art style for Rise is rather disgusting and the animation is horrendous but when all is said and done, it's definitely playable. Technically speaking though, it does feature a more complex map than LoL and I really do love the larger creeps and the more mature visual presentation. The items you can buy from the in-game map are weird and they have a really peculiar item upgrade mechanics. It's apparent that Petroglyph is trying to do things a little differently from Defense of the Ancients, LoL, as well as Heroes of Newerth and the best example of their departure from the norm is the pre-game hub where you can move your "immortals" around. Also, each of the immortals have their own talent trees and they level up outside of the matches. The problem with this is that when you are matched against high level players, they definitely have the advantage over you but I suppose that things will balance out somewhat once you have reached the highest level per immortals. The other problematic thing about this game is that there are only 14 immortals available to be selected at this time. Only 2 new immortals have been introduced post launch so it looks like things are progressing a lot slower in this game compared to the more established MOBAs. The good thing here is that this game follow Riot Games' free to play model which means that it is truly free. The more you play the game, the more points you can accumulate to permanently unlock immortals and buy trinkets for them. Just like in LoL, those who are impatient can always pay with real cash to get to the things they want faster access to.
Just because the character models are detailed, it doesn't mean that they are necessarily pretty,
I plan to keep playing Rise because it can definitely be rather entertaining at times. It just needs more characters but at least it feels a lot more polished than Realm of the Titans that is still in beta - oh that reminds me that I really do have to jump back on that game again and play it more. Since Rise will not cost you anything to play, give it a try. It certainly deserves at least that. Sign up for your free account through Steam or directly from the official website.
FIRST IMPRESSION: 3 out of 5
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