When Hero Shooters Roll Out On Tracks
World of Tanks: HEAT is the newest high profile hero shooter entering the market. But instead of a colorful array of heroes jumping and blasting their way around an arena, tanks are crushing objectives and launching heavy ordinance at each other in a bid for dominance.
Each match pits two teams of tanks against each other, with either 5v5 or 10v10 game modes. Smaller teams are used in games of Control, Hardpoint, and Kill Confirmed which focus on capturing and holding objectives, zones, or collecting enemy tags for points. The larger 10v10 games are for Conquest, which requires each team to capture and hold several objectives spaced out across larger maps.
Choosing Your Place On The Battlefield
There are several tank classes available: Defender, Assault, and Marksman. Defender and Assault tanks are meant to be in the thick of battle, with Defenders acting as anchor points in battle, while Assault tanks quickly mobilize in and out of combat to do major damage. The Marksman class is intended to sit back and rain down fire from afar. Each tank has an agent that also has special abilities that augment their playstyle, as well as special ultimate moves that action heavy targeted damage to tanks or help control the battlefield.
Between games, tanks can be improved with modules and augments, and additional tanks and agents can be unlocked with the in-game currency. Or, of course, real world money can be used to skip the tedious process of unlocking them. New agents mean different abilities, and new modules mean improved stats to give players an edge over their opponents.
Overall the gameplay isn’t necessarily bad. Tanks are responsive and agile, and the aiming system is user-friendly for players that don’t spend a ton of time researching tank vulnerabilities. The cursor for aiming highlights where the barrel is pointed and shows a heat map that shows weak points on the tank. Rounds can deflect off armor, or penetrate and deal massive damage to critical systems. These critical hits can turn the tide of battle, and give players a fighting chance when against multiple enemies. Of course, tracks can also be disabled with a well-placed shot. When a fight is unwinnable, sometimes disengaging to reposition is the best call.
The Grind Begins Almost Immediately
However, only three tanks and characters are available upon booting up the game for the first time. It’ll take hours to grind out additional tanks and heroes if you don’t feel like spending money on the game, Meanwhile, players who choose to spend some cash will have access to a wider range of agents and tanks, and will also have more to spend on modules to improve them.
Hero shooters are best when players start on equal footing. While World of Tanks: HEAT doesn’t force players to spend money to unlock new agents, grinding to unlock all of them will take dozens of hours. This means team composition is always going to be influenced based on which team has spent more time or money on the game, which can dissuade new players. Modules that affect each tank’s stats also ruin any semblance of an even playing field, again putting new players at a disadvantage.
Locked Into Battles You Don’t Want To Fight
Another issue is that players select their tank and hero unit at the beginning of matchmaking and then whatever the map and team composition is, is how the game plays out. I was unfortunate enough to select the Marksman class to try for the first time and then got placed on a compact 5v5 map, where the objective was fully surrounded by buildings, and every other player was running assault or defender tanks which thrive in close combat.
This killed my desire to want to play the Marksman class on the off chance that I would get placed on that same map again. Especially since once the game starts it needs to be played through to the end, and leaving the match early results in a penalty where you can’t matchmake until the previous match ends. There also isn’t a rejoin match option present, so whether you leave intentionally or not – I also had the game crash on me mid-match – it becomes a waiting game until the match is over.
Heroes Need Personality Too
Beyond that, while most won’t be playing any hero shooters for the story, it’s worth noting just how bad the dialogue is in HEAT. Whether it hits the level of ‘so bad its good’ will be a matter of personal taste, but the quips are bad. One that stuck with me was, “The day I stop doing this thing is the day I grow old.”
That’s not a clever line. It’s barely a line. It’s just stating an ordinary fact as some profound revelation. There are several bad lines that come up while playing and that was just one of the earliest ones that I kept hearing.
As a hero shooter, making the characters likable tends to help attract players to the game. But the characters themselves are uninteresting, and the tanks push the arcadey gameplay that is present in standard World of Tanks to the extreme. This carves an already relatively niche audience down even more, which raises concerns about long-term viability.
A Strong Concept Held Back By Its Systems
Again, the overall gameplay isn’t necessarily poor, but there are several major factors working against it. The inflexible matchmaking system makes it easy to get stuck into games that just aren’t fun with no recourse. While the slow progression system heavily incentivizes new players to either spend money on new tanks or constantly fight against tanks that won’t be unlocked without hours of grinding.
World of Tanks: HEAT isn’t the worst addition to the hero shooter genre. It does fill a niche in the tank battle hero genre; a genre that doesn’t have a ton of competition. But the grind to fully experience things, and the rigid matchmaking systems in place, are major turn-offs.
Important Links
World of Tanks: HEAT – A Free And Faster Spin On Tank Warfare – https://www.thexboxhub.com/world-of-tanks-heat-a-free-and-faster-spin-on-tank-warfare/
World of Tanks: HEAT is a New Hero-Enhanced Tank Shooter Rolling with Full Cross-Play – https://www.thexboxhub.com/world-of-tanks-heat-is-a-new-hero-enhanced-tank-shooter-rolling-with-full-cross-play/
Download for free via the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/world-of-tanks-heat/9n11jm7f5cxk
