An Hour of Paladins

A few days ago I logged on to Steam and downloaded a new game to play called Paladins. To be honest, until I read their wiki page this morning, I thought this was an old game and could have sworn I watched someone play it years ago, which is kind of freaking me out. I don't know why I thought that?

Anyway, the gist of it is that it's Overwatch / Team Fortress 2 with a different skin and a different monetization system. Blizzard asks you for money up front and quite frequently holds "free weekends" so that players can give it a shot.  Vice Versa, Hi-Rez gives you five free heroes to play always and asks for money to unlock them all -- alternatively you can micro-transaction purchase heroes one-by-one and apparently for in-game currency as well? I did that with this guy . . .

Yup . . . that looks like something I'd love to play.

When you go to purchase, they put all the options in front of you.

Basically 200 gems is five bucks -- with 39 heroes you can see it clearly makes sense to purchase the pack unless they give you enough cash throughout gameplay to unlock all the heroes, which I'm unsure of yet. What I did see was that if you log in daily, they have a reward system available to you.

Aesthetically I can't help but feel like I'm playing Overwatch with Skylander toys in a way. You remember Skylanders don't you?  My kids had us buy tons of those and hardly played with them at all.  What I didn't know is that they have a cartoon now?

I may actually have to watch that! . . . I digress.

Anyway, I'm a total of 10 games in (with one scaley dragonborn character unlocked), so I can't give much of a fair review yet, and that's not typically what I do anyway here on the Friendly Necromancer. What I do is play games, tell you about it, and get your thoughts. Why? Why not?!  Amirite? So if you have experience beyond an hour in the game, let me know.

Here's how my hour went. I played a tank character named Ruckus to start. He's a little goblin dude that pilots a suit of armor.  

Notice that player in the back with Drogos? That's when I was like . . . mine!

I think the first few matches might have been us paired against bots because there's no way regular people are just going to run to point like that.  After a few matches with Ruckus, the game shifted to a 5v5 deathmatch.  I was still playing Ruckus, but then I came into a match where a dude auto-locked Ruckus and I had to go with a second option, which was Viktor (a straight DPS character who plays a bit like soldier 76).

(Sorry for the poor quality on the video btw . . . I'm a bit time crunched or I'd record it again)

I faced my first defeat after 10 matches or so when my group didn't have a support character playing with us and the other team did -- it makes a big difference. 

So there you have it . . . I'm going to be playing a bit of Drogos in this game since my motto with lizardfolk-esque characters in any game is basically "if it has scales, it's MY BABY!" I'll be sure to let you know how it goes.

Happy Dueling!