Genre: Action
Subgenre: MOBA
Developer: Monolith Studios
Publisher: Warner Brothers
Released: December 4, 2012
Rated: T for Teen (fantasy violence, use of alcohol)
First things first:
never heard of a MOBA game? It stands for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. The basic premise is that there are two teams, and each player on a team selects a single, powerful unit to use to fight the enemy. Many MOBA games also feature troop/soldier units that walk along pre-determined "lanes" to advance on the enemy's side, fight their units, and eventually destroy their base building, which is often a tower.
The subgenre essentially started with a WarCraft 3 fan-made mod called
Defense of the Ancients. The mod became so popular that people started forming leagues to play it, and this eventually led to the creation of full retail games on PC that refined the gameplay and added their own features and styles.
League of Legends is one of the most popular, being played still today in MLG, but the retail version of DotA2 is also enjoyed by many. There are many other games, like Heroes of Newarth, Demigod, Defenders of Ardania, Awesomenauts and Smite, but until this title, there haven't been any great, dedicated MOBAs for console players.
Enter
Guardians of Middle-earth!
The first thing that makes
GoME unique is that its gameplay is tailored to the gamepad-style controller instead of a keyboard and mouse. You use the right analog to aim your character's basic attacks and use face buttons and triggers to fire off abilities/powers.
The second thing that makes
GoME unique is that all of its characters and their abilities are based in lore from
J.R.R. Tolkien's
Middle-earth fantasy fiction. Many folks are familiar with The
Lord of the Rings, and they will find a lot to love here, but this game particularly focuses on the time frame of
The Hobbit story which is about 60 years before the LotR events. This means some characters may not be as familiar, and there is a conspicuous absence of heroes you would expect to find such as Aragorn or Gimli.
Instead of these, you get Arathorn, who is Strider's father, and Gloin* who is Gimli's dad. Older characters are present such as Gandalf and Legolas
(he's an elf, after all).
The developer
Monolith obviously has a deep love for the source material as it permeates every aspect of GoME. Each character's powers/abilities are named after some aspect of their character from the books, and the relics you use to customize your character are also named after
(sometimes esoteric) parts of Middle-earth.
As you
level up your profile in the game, you open up Loadout slots which each represent a "belt". You fill these belts with relics and then fill the relics with gems. An example is a 3 slot relic that, when activated, adds health regeneration to your character. You might put gems in the slots to get more health points or increase your character's attack speed. Early in the game you can only afford basic relics and cheap gems with minimal effects but as you level up and get money, you can buy or win powerful relics and mithril gems that have much more pronounced effects.
In addition to these loadouts, you also get 4 command slots and 4 potion slots. Commands do things like provide a quick heal or direct damage on cooldown, and potions let you boost your basic attacks, ability power, or damage to structures.
Taken altogether, you use these to customize characters to your liking and/or tailor them to certain match types.
The base match type is a 20 minute, 5 vs 5 battle to see who can destroy whose home tower first. There is a brief lobby wait before each match, and
if all slots aren't filled in 2 minutes, bots are added. Unfortunately, there are only 10 characters that can serve as bots so you see the same few units frequently, but they are at least competent and not easy, run-over kills.
There is also an
elite battlegrounds mode where there is no wait time limit in the lobby and
the match only starts when all 10 slots are filled by human players.
The other match types are custom battlegrounds, which let you host a match and determine how many people or bots play, and lets you invite friends, and a
Survival mode* which is only available to folks who purchase it or obtain it via the Season Pass.
There is a lot to like about GoME;
the gameplay is fast and responsive once you get used to the weird, almost dance-like rhythm of MOBAs. The visuals capture the feel of the Peter Jackson movies while adding a touch of "painterly" style like you'd see in a Blizzard-Activision game.
It can be difficult to discern exactly what is happening in the 5v5 fusterclucks that happen in the early stages of 1-lane matches, but the game has optional floating combat text & icons that alert you to relevant status effects.
GoME launched with some terrible netcode--matches were consistently laggy and dropped connections were frequent. Since then, Monolith has released several updates and smoothed over the vast majority of bugs.
Surprisingly, Monolith has continued to support the title past the release of the first Hobbit film. Their forums are hilariously slow and they seem to prefer releasing new character DLC rather than fixing common issues, but I feel like this is just as much Microsoft's fault for their expensive and heavy-handed processing of title updates. Despite the overhead, Monolith has released a slow but steady drip of balance changes and new, free maps.
Several months after launch, the online community for this title continues to thrive. There are still occasional issues with overseas players dropping out, but overall I have been pleasantly surprised by both the developer and the community.
GoME is a fast, fun, stream-lined version of the big MOBAs, and I would definitely recommend it to any fan of multiplayer action and/or Lord of the Rings/Hobbit books & films.
Replayability & Value: The game creates a profile for you independent of the characters, and this profile gains XP. As you level up, more options unlock and more gold is rewarded to buy characters, gems and relics, which in turn opens up new strategic options. This is what makes MOBAs so much fun! You'll enjoy trying out different loadouts and playing a Guardian for the first time is great. The online community isn't nearly as hostile to n00bs as LoL/DotA; people will play private matches or skirmishes with you, and offer advice if you ask, and you can view anyone's loadout at any time. Even if competitive multiplayer isn't your thing, the Skirmish and Survival modes allow you to team up with 4 other people or bots and play on your terms. There is a Prestige system where you can reset your profile rank and unlock everything again. All of the prestige 8's and 10's I've messaged are friendly and helpful. If you enjoy the mechanics, there is a huge amount of potential content and gameplay, you could easily slip hundreds of hours in to this.
Achievements & Extras: GoME's 29 achievements total up to 400G and are easily attainable. Most of them require you to be in a battlegrounds match but you can party-up and play at odd hours to boost via bots if that's your thing. Really, though, they will likely come with regular play. The only difficult one would be getting 20 kills in a single match but once you know the flow of the game and have favourite characters, you can tailor your belt and potions to the task.
Try it here:
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Trial-Game-Guardians-of-Middle-earth/95dbd131-43ab-4000-aeb3-3f83c44a0ac5?cid=SLink
Intro/trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42QA1pmQDl0
Gameplay:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caYW7d-8MIY
Keywords: lotr, hobbit, ea, peter jackson, warner brothers, lord of the rings, moba, monolith studios, guardians of m-e
