Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft Review

Hearthstone_10

Damn it, they’ve only gone and done it again.

There are few game companies that can match Blizzard’s track record of putting out quality games that suck up hundreds of hours of their players’ time. From Diablo to World of Warcraft, millions of people play their titles every single day. But while World of Warcraft continues to slowly lose traction, with its subscriber numbers on a slow but steady downward trajectory, Hearthstone has been eagerly awaited by seemingly every man and his murloc for quite some time.

Now it’s finally released after an extended beta process, anyone with access to a computer - and soon, a mobile device - can play it.

The good news? It’s excellent - polished to a mirror shine, wonderfully balanced and steeped in minor details that will have Warcraft fans alternately giggling and nodding in appreciation.

The bad news? You’re likely to lose a lot of time - and potentially spend a lot of money - playing it: It’s ridiculously addictive.

While there already exists a physical card game based on the Warcraft universe, Hearthstone bears no relation to it. Instead, Blizzard has taken the familiar principles of collectable card strategy games and streamlined them to the hilt, while sacrificing none of the depth that the genre is known for. If you’re at all familiar with games such as Magic: The Gathering, you’ll be in familiar territory, but you don’t need to be familiar in order to enjoy Hearthstone. Essentially, each match sees two players (or a player vs AI) face off, casting spells and summoning minions in a bid to reduce each others health points to zero.

All together now: RRRRRRRRRRRRRRLGGGGGRRRR

Of course, if you were able to use all your cards at once, matches would be over pretty quickly. Games of this nature tend to tackle this problem in various ways - some, like Magic the Gathering require you to play land cards, which are then used as resources to pay a casting cost. Others, like Fluxx, limit the number of cards that can be played in each turn (though in the case of Fluxx, that limit tends to change rather frequently).

Hearthstone sees Blizzard looking at the competition and finding its own way through the problem in the form of mana. At the beginning of each match, players begin with just one mana in their resource pool - although a lucky coin toss could see you being granted an additional mana. To play a card, you must be able to afford the mana cost listed on it, and naturally the more powerful the card, the higher its cost. Each subsequent turn sees your spent mana replenished plus an additional one added to the pool. Thus, as games go on, players are able to play more and more powerful cards.

In addition to enabling you to play cards from your hand, mana has another use. Each class of hero comes with a special ability, which can be played once per turn at the cost of 2 mana. These abilities suit the playstyle of the character you’re using - Priests can heal themselves, Mages can cast a fireball at a player or minion of their choosing, and so on.

There are 9 different character classes to choose from, each reflecting a class from World of Warcraft and each requiring a different playstyle. Some cards are common to multiple classes, though others are unique. You won’t be playing Arcane Explosion if you’re playing as a warrior, but murlocs seem to have no particular allegiance. Though you start with only one class unlocked - the Mage - the rest are unlocked after beating a computer-controlled opponent.

In addition, classes level up the more you play them, similarly to how you level up your characters in WoW. New levels bring with them new cards to add to your deck, allowing you to begin tailoring the ultimate death-dealing selection so that you can decimate your opponent or, more likely, suffer a humiliating defeat at their hands.

Thankfully though, the matchmaking system Blizzard has put into place is pretty good at ensuring that you’re only ever pitted against opponents of a similar skill level as yourself. It’s incredibly rare that you’ll find yourself up against someone you don’t stand a chance against, and this constant sense that victory is only a moment away ensures that you’ll keep going back for just one more game until you’re still sat at your desk, hours later, tweaking your deck and streamlining your strategies.

As well as the aforementioned leveling of classes, you’ll also earn gold as you play, which can be spent in the in-game store on additional packs of cards. While the contents of these packs are entirely random, Blizzard has nevertheless managed to make simply opening them an incredibly rewarding experience. Accompanied by a burst of music and light, you’ll open a pack to find yourself being given cards for a class you never play - but, oddly, you’ll still feel grateful for it. Blizzard has become a master of making players feel constantly rewarded over the course of their development history, and that experience has definitely been applied here.

Here’s where I should mention my sole concern with the game. While you can spend in-game gold to unlock new cards, you can also spend real money. Fair enough, the contents of each pack are randomized - but if anything, that randomness might compel some people to spend real money in rather large amounts in order to simply get that one card which an opponent played to totally devastate them in a previous game. It also means that if you’re willing and able to spend enough money, in theory you can unlock the best and rarest cards far sooner. Of course, the mana system ensures that those cards will always carry a high resource cost, but it’s nevertheless a little worrying to think that you could be beaten by an opponent simply because they were willing to spend more real money than you.

But leaving that one concern aside - and make no mistake, while it sounds like it could be game-breaking, it really isn’t - Hearthstone is utterly fantastic. The little details that Blizzard has put in seem minor on the face of it - click on aspects of the playing field and you’ll trigger little animations and sound effects - but they all add up to a glorious whole. Hearthstone may see Blizzard aiming at a more casual market, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth your time. This is an utterly fantastic game that exudes polish from every digital pore. If you love card games, love Warcraft, or just love games in general, you owe it to yourself to play Hearthstone.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have decks to build.

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Dale Morgan

Dale Morgan

Founder, Editor in Chief
When Dale isn't crying over his keyboard about his never-ending workload, he's playing games - lots of them. Dale has a particular love for RPGs, Roguelikes and Metroidvanias.
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