more about spess

I'm getting ready to for launch and should be making my way to spring hill shortly.  It was nice to see my parents but god help them. I'm beginning to remember now why I left. This blog is definitely no testament to my dutiful pursuit of writing. Still, I'd rather try to adhere to a new schedule than lament failing older ones so lets continue from yesterday.


Awesomenauts has been described as a side scrolling MOBA. That's a rather accurate description but what is a MOBA? The acronym of MOBA stands for Multiplier Online Battle Arena. This style of game was originally popularized by Warcraft 3 and went on to spawn many games of a similar flavor. Most notably DotA (Defense of the Acients) and HoN (Heroes of Newerth). In a MOBA things basically boil down to you picking out a fighter and using team work and a various combination of skills to break down "towers". These towers are powerful defensive points that deal death to the opposing team if they're  approached without an army of minions. Minions take damage from towers so you use them to shield yourself as you attack your enemy's towers and eventually get to their base where you can attack said base. Awesomenauts implements all of these facets like you'd come to expect from most MOBAs. Unlike most MOBA's however, matches don't drag on for more than 10 to 20 minutes compared to League of Legends where you can expect to spend 30 minutes to an hour in a single match...assuming of course both teams are equally matched.

Aesthetically Awesomenauts is very well rounded. The environments and the characters work together to create a Saturday morning cartoon kind of feel ( check out the intro here). The game controls well but the action can be all over the place which is not uncommon in the genre. From what I played it so far it was fun until one match which had a space monkey that would hover unending while attacking me from beyond my reach. I stopped playing and figured there may be some rebalancing in the future. When I wasn't getting trounced the game was actually very fun. I'd hold off on buying the game until they manage to fix matchmaking to make sure new players don't get matched up against better skilled ones as well as one's who have a high level player level. On that note you get experience after every match that increases the level and gives you access to more (read better) options for customizing how your character plays in matches.

to go over some things quickly

+the game is pretty is simple to learn and easy to get into.
+stylistically it looks wonderful and sounds great.
+like FTL it has a smaller file size than most games and the graphics won't strain your computer but this game does have future updates planned so the small file size may change.

-lack of variety- more specifically there's a hand full of "Awesomenauts" to pick from so far. This should be addressed in future updates hopefully. Also a few more levels would be nice too and since things are in 2D the sky is pretty much the limit here.
-The game also lacks balance in some areas (Jetpack monkey I'm looking at you). Hopefully issues regarding balance will get resolved in subsequent patches.