Warlord Strike review
:: SOLO QUEUEPrice: Free
Version: 1.1.3
App Reviewed on: iPad Air 2
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Warlord Strike feels like a game someone made after experiencing one too many bad teammates in Vainglory. It takes a lot of the core concepts from MOBAs but gives only one player control an entire team of heroes. The result is a game that–while a bit rough around the edges–is full of creative solutions to make it a manageable experience.
SOBA
In Warlord Strike, you are the only person in control of 2-5 heroes. Most of the in-game action is similar to that of a MOBA, which involves a lot of tapping to position heroes and activating abilities as necessary to give you an edge in team fights. In any given match, the goal is for you to kill all enemy heroes before they have a chance to respawn.
Warlord Strike prevents its gameplay from being a simple deathmatch by providing a secondary objective to the game in the form of collecting power orbs that get strewn about the map. These orbs can grant players items that make their heroes stronger, which in turn should help make clashes with the enemy easier. This addition also acts as a neat flip on the store concept of most MOBAs.
Carry your team
MOBAs are generally very intense games that demand a huge amount of your attention and focus to control just one character on a team. Since Warlord Strike asks players to divide their attention to control up to five different heroes, there are a lot of gameplay tweaks in this game to make this multi-tasking more manageable.
The most noticeable of these tweaks is that Warlord Strike generally moves at a slower pace than a MOBA. Even when playing the game in Fast mode, things still happen at a slower clip. Other changes include the ability to select multiple heroes, tons of movement abilities to easily reposition heroes quickly, and quite a bit of leniency when it comes to landing skill shots.
The rough life of a lonely warlord
As neat as all of Warlord Strike's twists to MOBAs are, there are quite a few issues with the game. The first of these is the game visuals, which are serviceable, but sport a lot of sharp edges and stiff animations.
Looks aside, Warlord Strike seems to be modeled pretty directly off of Vainglory in a lot of ways, but implements a lot of the same ideas in a much less elegant manner. Tutorial videos, for example, are present and easily accessible from within the game to help teach new players how to play, but they cover only the most superficial aspects of the game. These are small things, but they stick out if you've played other, sleeker MOBAs on mobile.
As a free-to-play game, players have access to a few heroes at a time, though they can earn or purchase currency to unlock additional heroes. Players can also use this currency to unlock passive upgrades to their heroes in a “Sphere Grid”-type menu. While this second idea is neat, it also seems like a great way to give a competitive advantage to players that dedicate more time or money to the game. This would be less of a concern if Warlord Strike had a huge pool of players to match in multiplayer, but–considering the lengthy queue times to match two players together–it seems like the likelihood of being matched with fairness in mind is low.
The bottom line
Warlord Strike is a neat but flawed twist on MOBAs. Though it finds a lot of ways to solve the problem of controlling multiple heroes at once, it also gets a bit in its own way and creates new problems for itself. That said, it's still a pretty fun game. At the price of free, it's certainly worth checking out.