4 people found this review helpful
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 34.4 hrs on record (15.1 hrs at review time)
Posted: 5 May, 2021 @ 4:39pm
Updated: 27 Dec, 2021 @ 2:43am

This is a pretty neat game.

If you've ever watched professional Dota 2 or League and were confused about the whole draft phase and why it exists at all, this game simulates the importance of draft rather well in a simplified manner.

In this game, you play as...
Yourself! In an alternate universe where you became a god gamer and conquered the world of e-sports for 20 something years or something (very true to life, I'm sure). You are tasked with managing the training regime of your players and interpreting the metagame of the "game" within the game, in preparation for the main bulk of gameplay: draft phase.

During each match, you will have to navigate the pick/ban phase in an attempt to build a team comp that can potentially outdo your opponents which your AI-controlled team (literally bots) pilots into victory. While each player on your team may be skilled rather highly, the value of those stats will not matter if they get a terrible team comp or hard countered. Meaning that in order to succeed in this game the most important thing to learn is how to draft.

To help you in this goal, a lot of information is provided to for you to make an educated guess about what you should be aiming for. You can look through "champion" (the characters you use to make team compositions) win-rates, pick/ban rates, damage dealt, received, etc. as well as match data from other "e-sports organizations" in your bracket, and the team compositions they used. There's also a "Composition Test" which allows you to simulate a battle between any two comps in case you have some experimental ideas about compositions you'd like to try.

However, even if you manage to navigate the current meta well, the in-game devs will adjust the numbers of the champions randomly, making some picks much stronger or weaker, or usually not changing anything significant at all (just like League in real life). New champions will also be added over time, making determining what is good or not in differing drafts all the more complicated.

The system works well to make an underappreciated aspect of games with pick/bans more tangible to people. And if you've ever been interested in this kind of stuff, I encourage you to try it.

Now for some in-depth stuff:
There are a few changes that I'd like to see to make the game more easily legible, that is to say, currently, too much information is hidden away or obscured.

The obscured information results from a translation which works well enough generally, but isn't as concise or clear as it could be. This isn't too big an issue, but it should be fixable.

The hidden information however, is a bigger issue. Champion skills don't show numbers at all, meaning that it's harder to tell how good or bad they are until you're in a match. For a game that's all about drafting picks, I think it'd be good to provide the player information like skill damage or healing, otherwise champions like the Swordsman don't seem all that impressive, until he's doing a ridiculous amount of damage despite having some of the lowest offensive stats in the game. It also becomes harder to gauge his viability over time because it's hard to determine how much the nerfs or buffs affected him, if at all. In general, I can guess that attack damage nerfs hurt him, but I can't determine to what degree they affect him, and I'd say that's a problem.
Providing the numbers on the skills could also also open up space for the "in-game devs" to tweaking those numbers, which could make the game's patch cycle more dynamic and speculative.

I would also like the numbers from individual matches to be viewable from the team data screen. It's strange how I can view the damage dealt and received numbers during a match, but not after it's over. Arguably, one of the biggest boons to learning how to draft would be learning how one team performed another in a specific draft. I think it would be a great resource to provide.

My final suggestion would be unlocking or loosening the restrictions on the composition simulator. The only tangible benefit to its use is to experiment with alternate comps that you could have used in a certain match. Restricting its use to one per week is too limiting.
Maybe this restriction exists to discourage too much thinking about team comps and to instead lead players to play matches instead, or to prevent someone from brute forcing every possible team composition. In any case, I think that whatever the restriction is trying to prevent or possibly simulate is not conducive to the overall experience of the game, and places an arbitrary restriction on a resource that gives only abstract in-game value.

I hesitate somewhat to make these suggestions. As the game currently is, I think it's pretty good. I simply hope that future updates could go a few steps further beyond simply adding more champions, and I look forward to what is in store for this game.

To anyone who has bothered reading this far, I thank you.
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