Alright, I’m going to keep this one fairly short and sweet. I’m sure I opened this game before, it feels like something I’ve durdled around in before. That, or the art and the structure is just such a clean synthesis of this archetype that you kind of know the game just from playing others like it.

So, Awesomenauts is a DOTA of the 2d sidescroller variety. The art is bright and happy, the world is fun to hop around in (although like cuphead, I find the agility and responsiveness of the characters a little low). I hopped into this and after a brief tutorial against bots I was stomping away in PvP zapping little minions and trying to snipe enemy players with some mish-mash of randomly upgraded powers.

The truth is, I’m not the right person to give a DOTA game a fair review. I remember back in the early 2010s road-tripping off to an MLS in Rhode Island to watch the rise of Starcraft 2 as a spectator sport. Barcraft culture was spreading all over the world, there were pro players running podcasts analyzing recent games and patch notes, and we got to spend a weekend watching these amazing kids play their keyboard with the precision and poise of master musicians. We cheered through incredible games where victories came down to split second decisions based on tiny bits of scouting information. We saw players fall behind 0-3, only to steal victory with a series of risky strategies. It had that television drama of the audience having information the player lacked. It had daring all-in plays and incredible mass army clashes. It made for a fantastic spectator sport.

To the right of us was a call of duty stage, which was team based. When I glanced over all I would see is a bunch of first person cameras sprinting around and dying, sprinting around and dying. Really it was about the same experience as you’d get playing the game. It had been around longer, but it was supported by the massive player base, it didn’t have the natural watchability to grow past that.

But then to our left was league of legends. It was surging. Way more fans than call of duty, and rivalling starcraft 2. It was one of the first major free to play games, which had quickly propelled it into being one of the biggest games in the world. I stared at it with a bit more curiosity – certainly it was more watchable than CoD. But I didn’t really get it.

Its popularity exploded, and as it grew, SC2 shrank. And blizzard was angry – hadn’t that game form been invented on warcraft 3 servers, anyways? Eventually they would give up and make heroes of the storm to join the bandwagon. If you were aligned against corporate greed you may well have cheered on the rise of LoL.

But I didn’t. I never really got dotas. I didn’t like how long the games were. I found the tactical movement boring. I liked to be a lone wolf, a glass cannon, an assassin. But if you took risks in a dota your teammates would just yell at you. Stop dying, go sit in the back and slowly kill adds until you’re max level, dummy.

I still don’t get them. I’ve been butthurt since LoL beat sc2. So, I’m not the right one to review awesomenauts. I like the look of it, the design it pretty clean, it wasn’t that obnoxious to get into, it seems like it’s probably a pretty fun version of this kind of game. I just don’t want to move down lanes to kill towers and then destroy cores in a long drawn out tug of war. It’s a cool idea, looks well done, no idea where this falls in the grand scheme of dota-variants, not my thing. Play at your own risk!

I won’t be beating this because it seems like it’s basically an online pvp only game, so how do you beat that? Whatever!