Warlander can hardly be put into words

Warlander takes on a lot, and that could also become the game’s problem. The free-to-play title was introduced to me with a video in a gloomy medieval decorated room. A little more colorful than the name and the decoration of this room initially suggested, the game is then but.

Unlike pure MOBAs like League of Legends or Dota 2, which rely on fixed hero designs, you can create your character yourself like in an RPG, give him different skin colors and hairstyles, and decorate his armor and shields with different colors and patterns. By leveling up and collecting equipment with different rarity values, the characters get better stats and abilities, but also get a longer cooldown.

During a match you can switch between clerics, fighters and mages of different levels if you have collected enough Valor points. These are obtained through certain actions. Five characters form a deck, which determines the pool from which you can switch. You can currently save six of these decks. Then you don’t have to search for your compositions anew every time. It’s also cool that even the Meele classes have the option to use a crossbow and fight from a distance.

Just before the game starts, a large clump of warriors gathers within your own castle walls.

Even otherwise, the game doesn’t have much to do with classic multiplayer online battle arenas. Yes, there are towers and a base, and you reach these via certain paths, the “lanes”, and you fight against other players. However, there is not much more in common then. That’s why the developer himself only calls the game online multiplayer and not MOBA.

Matches like I have never seen before

I was particularly surprised by the division of the teams, because here not only two teams can compete against each other, but also five groups can fight. The map in this case is built like a pentagram and each team consists of 20 players. You can compete alone or with a maximum of three other players. So you always play together with other players.

The map is changeable, you can destroy towers and bridges to open up new paths and rebuild them. The towers are there to be captured. Once you capture them, you can use them as spawn points to create a temporal and tactical advantage.

Because that alone isn’t enough, there are also abilities that randomly appear on the map. For example, you can unleash a large tornado or climb into a giant battle robot – but this happens rather rarely. You can also use large catapults if you want to defend your castle. Totally crazy, all of that. As you can imagine, I had a lot of questions after introducing this jam-packed concept. There was even some time left for a few of them.

Is it fog or smoke that obscures the view here? And is it always there? Well, at least I can close on it with the catapult, that’s fun!

Is Warlander now oversaturated?

I’m still a little skeptical after the first few rounds about how it’s all supposed to work. After all, all these features need to be well-balanced and players need to be able to use them intuitively – even in matches between five teams. Currently, it feels like three different games have been wildly mixed together. It was a little chaotic in the first match. Sometimes less is simply more.

In the second round, everything was a little clearer. After all, you get assigned a role in advance – regardless of class. Protect the castle! Okay, boss! The mini-map helps a bit with orientation and enemies are shown quite clearly, especially when they take damage. That’s important, too, because the map looks a bit smoky. I wouldn’t want to play Warlander on low brightness or with poor contrast.

I remembered the fluid gameplay in a particularly positive way. Shots, punches and movements were all executed cleanly and without problems. That’s extremely important, because it’s already chaotic enough when enemies from all lanes try to sneak into the castle, others rush at it with a battle robot, and at every important point a squad is supposed to defend.

So teamwork and tactics are important here – you should not play silently. Rather, each player has to communicate where he sees the enemy, where players are needed, which buildings have to be captured or repaired and with which tactics you want to fight back yourself. Quite a lot to pay attention to here

This is the core of the castle. You have to watch out for this sphere, because every point of damage the opponent inflicts on this sphere brings him closer to victory. After the timer expires, the winner is decided by this.
As a player with a rather flat learning curve, I didn’t manage to get completely through it within the two rounds I was allowed to take a peek. Even if the theory is clear, I had to warm up a bit on the map, get a feel for the handling of the weapons and abilities, and try out all the fun features that a League of Legends doesn’t provide.

MOBA knowledge will only get you so far here, and even otherwise it’s not that easy to get an overview as a beginner. However, since it was already much clearer after the second game, I assume that you’ll get used to the wild hustle and bustle faster than I had feared. Nevertheless, the sheer number of elements and possibilities could put off many players. Besides the helpful training mode, a slimmed-down fun mode would be an ideal solution for me.

What do the developers have to say about this?

The first thing I wanted to know was how the developer plans to keep players from being mercilessly overwhelmed by so many features. The team considers the built-in instructions to be sufficient. For example, there are tips that you can read through before a round. In addition, the role you take on already defines what tasks you have to do. This actually helped me to keep a bit more of an overview by limiting myself to a certain task area.

The strange world in which armies with battle robots and magic tornadoes conquer fortresses will also be explained in the course of the story. However, the development team didn’t want to tell me in advance how all of this is connected; players should rather find that out for themselves. Besides, Warlander should not be a pure medieval game. With a world in which everything is possible, new content can also be inserted wonderfully

And yes, new – Season s are supposed to be there, as well as a Battle Pass. So new content is constantly being added. How long a – Season will last has not yet been determined, but the team behind Warlander has so far been most comfortable with a cycle of three months. There is no ranking system for the time being, this will be added later. Your performance will still be measured to make the opponent search fair

You can try out Warlander for yourself as early as Monday, September 12. Here the open beta starts on the PC. Versions for PS5 and Xbox Series will come later – as will crossplay between the platforms.