Vainglory
MOBA's not a genre that's supposed to run well on mobile. They're seen as the preserve of hardcore gamers, needing fine-tuned controls, big maps, and complex decision trees. It's all anathema to what we've been conditioned to expect from a mobile experience.
But developer Super Evil Megacorp have thought hard about the right places to trim and tighten the play. Rather than many lanes of attack, there's just one. Plus a jungle area where you can hunt for gold, capture miners to strengthen your position, and sneak a flank attack on the enemy.
No matter how good a MOBA player you are individually, the team that knows where to be and when will usually come out on top. In Vainglory, a mostly excellent iOS MOBA, the key to victory is to play in the same physical room with your two teammates. As good as it is at distilling the fast-paced, skill-heavy action of the genre into a mobile format with 10 strong heroes and a great three-lane map, coordinating with an online team is a tremendous challenge.
Vainglory isn’t an attempt to approximate genre giants League of Legends and Dota 2 on an iPad -- it’s a strong, carefully constructed MOBA that exists on its own terms, and welcomes newcomers with open arms. It’s scaled down, rather than scaled back, and that’s a crucial misstep in most other MOBAs on the platform.
Vainglory includes each of the major MOBA elements but modifies them to fit its own playstyle. For example, the game includes creeps (called Minions), but its map only one lane, simplifying lane management. However, the game has a pretty robust jungle area with plenty of over brush that can hide your heroes. The jungle also has plenty of neutral creeps and a shop in the middle for item purchasing needs. Vainglory’s jungles also include three important keys to victory: Minion Mines, a Gold Mine, and the Kraken. Minion Mines are initially controlled by a strong neutral Minion Miner. Take him out, and your minions last longer and deal more damage, increasing their likelihood of taking on opposing minions, heroes and towers.
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Review by Mitch Dyer
Reviewed on iPad and iPhone / 10 Dec 2014
Vainglory Review
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Three's company
By Mitch Dyer No matter how good a MOBA player you are individually, the team that knows where to be and when will usually come out on top. In Vainglory, a mostly excellent iOS MOBA, the key to victory is to play in the same physical room with your two teammates. As good as it is at distilling the fast-paced, skill-heavy action of the genre into a mobile format with 10 strong heroes and a great three-lane map, coordinating with an online team is a tremendous challenge.
Vainglory isn’t an attempt to approximate genre giants League of Legends and Dota 2 on an iPad -- it’s a strong, carefully constructed MOBA that exists on its own terms, and welcomes newcomers with open arms. It’s scaled down, rather than scaled back, and that’s a crucial misstep in most other MOBAs on the platform.
Petal Gameplay in Vainglory
20:55
Developer Super Evil Megacorp has done a marvelous job with Vainglory’s map design, which leverages a superb jungle to give its simplistic design interesting layers. When working with my LAN team, we dominated nearly every game, usually because we refused to give up that place of opportunity. Capturing jungle control points increases your gold and minion strength, giving you more of an advantage as matches progress. Controlling those points is imperative – equally important to lane dominance – because it can turn the tide of a game.
Additionally, the 10 compelling heroes stand out. All are entertaining to play, and have fun relationships in combat. SAW, the lumbering machine-gunner, dominates in lane, but is too slow to jungle effectively. As such, laning with Petal and her three damage-dealing pets almost assures lane control, and she can dip into the jungle so a stronger SAW can kill on his own. Their designs are fun, too -- Joule with her mech suit, Krul with a glowing sword planted through his chest, and Ringo with his monk garb and gargantuan guns.
It’s difficult to comment on balance, however, because my team’s ability to verbally call for assistance or to plan out our attacks was always an enormous advantage. Allowing players to coordinate the strategy necessary to outplay another team, and without text or voice chat, multiplayer loses the nuance and effectiveness. Also concerning, Vainglory often pops up with messages like “Ally has been killed,” or “Enemy has been killed,” but not which has been killed. This makes it difficult to know who’s still in play to support or slaughter you. But sitting side by side, my team could set up huge plays, recover from bad ones, keep each other alive, and roam the dense jungle beneath the main lane hunting for easy kills. We almost felt bad about it – even first-timers will feel powerful playing this way.
The Gold Mine is another important feature. A powerful Gold Miner constantly mines gold in the middle of the jungle. Kill him and your team earns all the gold he has collected and will continue to earn gold as the game plays on. Both types of mines can also be stolen by the enemy, making for a pretty good back-and-forth battle that takes place in the jungle at the same time as lane battles. The Kraken is the final piece of the puzzle: a powerful enemy replaces the gold miner at the 16 minute mark and requires the entire team to take him out. However, if you do so, you recruit the Kraken to your side and he’ll slowly make his way to the enemy base, taking down opposing turrets, heroes and eventually the Vain itself. He can be stopped, but for most teams, having the Kraken launched against you is a death sentence.
As you can imagine, Vainglory has what it takes to be an incredibly deep game simply from the setup. Its heroes take that depth even further. Heroes are generally classified into the MOBA archetypes, which some designed for laning, others for jungling and others still for utility roles. Heroes are well balanced and while some require more timing and game awareness to play, I found each to be immensely enjoyable in their own way. Vainglory’s shop system also complements its heroes well, with a plethora of items to purchase that improve stats or offer consumables.
This is simultaneously satisfying and concerning. Vainglory matches last around 20 minutes, typically because one team snowballs out of control and becomes too powerful for the enemy team to gain an inch. If one side takes an early lead based on quick kills and jungle control, they’ll have the advantage at the 15 minute mark, when the enormous, game-ending Kraken creature spawns. Capture the Kraken, and it’ll flatten enemy turrets. If you’re lucky, you can turn around a losing battle by gaining control of Kraken -- the monster absorbs massive amounts of damage, allowing you to wipe out distracted opponents -- but it was rare in my experience, because the game is effectively decided by that point.
Frequent lopsided battles may indicate balance issues in Vainglory, though like most MOBAs it’s frequently patched. But in a game prone to one team already running away with it 15 minutes in, unleashing a Kraken seems like an excessive addition of insult to injury.
In a mediocre MOBA, these wouldn’t be notable issues. But, because Vainglory succeeds handily in translating the best of MOBAs onto phones and tablets, it drew my attention toward finer details. Vainglory is commendable in this way -- its characters, map, and general design are so good that I think about how it’s balanced, rather than how it failed to accomplish the fundamentals.
Vainglory is absolutely beautiful and takes full advantage of Metal (one of the main reasons it was featured in Apple’s keynote). On my iPhone 6, I was met with cool visual effects, highly detailed heroes and backdrops, and no slowdown at all. Admittedly, visuals are probably not on the short list of what makes a great MOBA, but it’s still cool to play a game that looks this great on your iOS device. Relatedly, I never had an issue with latency or freezes in the dozens of matches I’ve played online.
Controls are another important facet for mobile MOBAs and Vainglory executes them near flawlessly. Everything is controlled via taps and menus, power selection, and targeting are all implemented in such a way that I hardly ever had issues with mis-tapping. In fact, I was pretty impressed with how every facet of Vainglory felt tailored to touch controls. Even the in-game ‘Help’ menus, which offer a wealth of information at a glance for your heroes, are implemented well. Speaking of help menus, Vainglory has some of the best tutorial videos I’ve seen yet on an iOS MOBA.
Vainglory’s touch controls work beautifully on an iPad, which has enough real estate to effectively scroll across the map, navigate your hero, and have a skill-based ability hit its mark. On iPhone, even on the large iPhone 6 Plus, Vainglory feels cramped, and alerting teammates with visual pings, attacking specific enemies, and keeping track of the action can be challenging.
I’m hoping to see more added to Vainglory. With 10 heroes, many matches see similar team compositions based on which characters are free that week – which, to be fair, is generally more than half the roster. On the other hand, some are arbitrarily, prohibitively expensive to buy permanently, to the point that purchasing premium currency seems the only option. It’s inoffensive, but inconsistent, and therefore annoying – but I’ve been completely satisfied playing free heroes.
Hero selection itself is where the game’s freemium elements come into play. Heroes are rotated but can be purchased permanently via Glory (the game’s in-game currency which is earned with every battle) or ICE (the premium currency). It’s important to note that I considered no aspect of Vainglory’s freemium facets to be considered pay-to-win. Instead, its monetization favors the more established free-to-play MOBAs and is very fair.
So Vainglory’s parts are all excellent, how well does it play as a whole? Quite awesomely. Battles are relatively lengthy (15-30 minutes) but are a bit less complicated than most desktop MOBAs. However, the great balance of all the heroes, combined with the decent amount of activities to do within the game’s map means there are a variety of ways to aid your team. In fact, the only issue I’ve had so far is with players going AFK during battles. However, Vainglory includes a ‘Karma’ system that rewards players that stick around to the end of the match. The hope is players that don’t leave matches early will eventually only be paired with similar players, minimizing matchmaking with dropouts.
Upskilling
Characters only have a choice of three skills. They use the same technology tree, although different ones will benefit from different purchases. It's not too hard to wrap your head around, although the tutorial is pretty basic. MOBA veterans should find it easy going.
After all that judicious pruning, there's still a smart and challenging game at the center of Vainglory. It's a bit like capture the flag.
You're aiming to destroy the enemy crystal and protect yours. Along the way there's a series of super-tough turrets you'll need to destroy. You'll only do that with the help of both team-mates and your AI controlled minions.
Action in the jungle helps the maps feel bigger than they are. At the beginning it's the only safe way to rack up experience. As the game progresses, capturing miners to bolster gold and minions becomes a fascinating sideshow to the main event.
The real depth in the game is learning how to handle the characters and their different abilities.
There's a typical mix on offer from slow but heavy-hitting tanks, to helpful support staff, through to those who prefer to summon help and stay out of direct action. Success requires a good understanding of what skills and equipment to purchase.
Up itself
How new players can learn this is not obvious. Other gamers, more seasoned MOBA players than me, kept handing me my buttocks on a plate, even though the game is still fresh on the app store. At first, I had little idea why. When it comes to certain character matchups, I still have little idea why.
Possibly, they're just communicating better. A lot of the subtlety in MOBA games comes from planning, co-ordinating moves and setting traps for the opposition.
To do that, it helps to be able to talk to them. On PC, VOIP makes that a doddle. But Vainglory has no such feature. You're left staring at the avatars of your team mates as they bustle around, wondering what they're scheming.
Beginners are going to die a lot. And because of that steep and impenetrable learning curve, that phase is going to last a long time.
So it's unfortunate that Vainglory penalises dead players with an increasing wait timer to rejoin the game. Of course there has to be a downside to throwing your life away, but as the times ramp up, frustration sets in.
There's a similar result to one-sided matches which, again, you'll probably see a lot of at the start. Games run a minimum of 15 minutes before you can even think of surrendering.
That's a lot of time to watch your team getting wiped off the board by more experienced opposition. Closer matches can run as long as a half hour, a big chunk by mobile standards.
Uplifting
You can while away some of the downtime enjoying the scenery, because it's a drop-dead gorgeous game. It ran like butter on my iPad 4 and the controls felt tight and responsive. I doubt it'd hold up so well on older devices.
In many respects, Vainglory is an impressive achievement. It cuts all the right corners in terms of getting the game to mobile. The result is a demanding, thrilling game that feels suited to the hardware while retaining the soul of the MOBA experience.
It's just a shame that it couldn't squeeze that important plank of a genuinely great mobile game, accessibility, into the mix too.
I absolutely love everything that Vainglory has to offer. It’s a full MOBA experience that offers all the strategy and excitement that the genre is known for while modifying and tailoring the core concepts to mobile. Streamlining some facets (like lanes) while retaining hero and power/upgrade depth makes for battles that never feel boring. Vainglory also retains that awesome MOBA feeling of domination when all three team members are in sync. It’s an important aspect which should encourage players to develop a robust friend system for party gameplay.
Seeing how Vainglory is free, there’s really no reason not to check it out. However, I’d go even further and say that it’s probably the best MOBA on iOS and offers both an awesome experience for MOBA veterans while also providing an approachable avenue for novices. Simply put, you owe it to yourself to check out Super Evil Megacorp’s latest masterpiece.
Vainglory hits the highest highs of a great MOBA, but only when playing locally with friends against a team that’s doing the same. Queuing into a random game with strangers spotlights massive communication problems that get in the way of Super Evil Megacorp’s smart level and character design. It’s accessible for first-timers looking to get their feet wet, while offering enough depth to satisfy those with hundreds of hours of experience on more complex PC strategy games. Just make sure to bring friends.
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