Dawngate Review

Another big publisher making a Free to Play MOBA

I have no idea what's going on with everyone thinking MOBA is a profitable game market. This time it's Electronic Arts (EA). Now I'm not sure who the development team behind it is as the link for "About Us" on the games sight takes you straight to EA's info page even though it is listed as Waystone Games, an indie looking team, on the site. As for the game, it is currently in closed beta stages with servers that aren't actually on all the time. As for the MOBA theme, the aim is to get through the enemy structures, into their base and destroy the main objective. In Dawngate there is however only two lanes, one top one bottom, with jungle camps and bushes in between, some sort of spirit wells and more jungles above, and the super neutral creep in the dead centre that takes a while to kill and grants a decent buff. It's the usual 5v5 teams with no option for bots and no ranked matches. The "Shapers" (characters you play as) are categorised in a way which I'm assuming ha something to do with their different powers/role but there is no tutorial or explanations as to what they do, only a pop-up telling you how to purchase "Shapers". Greedy EA.

The graphics have very limited optimisation and take up about a hair worth of an average CPU/GPU combo's memory. They are also fairly simplistic in nature and very bright and childish. As the MOBA scene is more of a more hardcore gamer habitat, not a place for childish looks. The Shapers themselves play out fairly fluently, with a 10 Shaper free to play cycle and a rather balanced system. It also has a neat feature of 3 "spells" that can be learnt at levels 1,11,20 (max. level). Another difference is that the main objective is a giant creature "see above" that throws out attacks and abilities to attacking minions and Shapers. Now here's where we run into our first problem. There is no mana or energy costs of any variety, so you can keeping on spamming those abilities all day. This removes the option for the game to have any form of eSports scene as it takes no skill to spam abilities and get a kill, which is where the MOBA genre becomes that highly profitable game that all these developers want. More problems, they seemed to have based some of their character movements directly from League of Legends, the abilities from all over the place, and most of the HUD and menus form Infinite Crisis. One of the Shapers floats the same way as Syndra, one like Graves and the item system even has similar icons to IC. 

  Although at first I thought the game looked fairly promising, it turned out to be a disappointing rip-off of good games in a bid to earn some more money from the worst Game Publisher (and voted worst company in America) Electronic Arts. Looks like you just keep failing. 3/10