Rise of Immortals is a new MOBA genre game that recently entered the closed beta. I managed to sneak in to try it out and see if it brings anything new to the genre, and unfortunately I don’t have much positive to say, and it’s not just because of the NDA.
Basically, the game needs plenty of work still. There are like 9 available champions so far, and rather than selecting one before the game you actually select a character you want to play with before the queue. There are a couple of things that I did found interesting however, and would perhaps like to see something like it developed in League of Legends as well.
Firstly, the “social hub”. When you enter the game with your hero you can actually see him and other players, walk around, and queue for games. It’s kind of cool to see your character and others, making the game a lot more social than LoL is, but that doesn’t really have any gameplay impact. Rise of Immortals also has will have a PvE aspect, which I’m not yet sure how it’ll work but sounds interesting for a change.
And that’s about it. The gameplay itself didn’t feel any better or improved in any way, hero abilities felt kind of boring to me and overall I don’t see RoI becoming a force in the MOBA community. Dota 2 maybe, but RoI as it is now probably won’t take any sizeable chunk of players from LoL.
That being said, when I first tried League of Legends during the beta, I didn’t like it either, so perhaps I’m totally wrong. In fact I do hope the game turns out to be decent as I wouldn’t mind some worthy competition to LoL: might make Riot implement new features faster at least.
If you want to try Rise of Immortals, you can get beta keys from Alienware and GetBetaKeys.