Recent reviews by eStecko

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Great game which Sony tries to kill, because they dared to disobey their corporate agenda.

The game alone is actually quite fun. One of a kind type of game.

A short video game that you'll like IF you are into dry, british humor or you'd like to support Yathzee and his wierdness. :P

I've played only little. But what I saw, was fun.

TOME is moba/dota-styled/brawler (w/e you wanna call the genre) with huge emphasis on team fights as HotS is, but it's own gripe on things. And instead of reading this wall of text, tl'dr - try it yourself, it's free anyway. :P

Also right away, I apologize for my english, it's not perfect or particulary good.

Let's start with the (sadly) shorter side of good stuff.

TOME doesn't have mana, which is one of the main reasons I loved Dawngate, so I felt pretty much felt home right away. Also if you are not combat, you rapidly heal max% of your health.

Audio-visual side of things is alright. It's not Crysis 3 awesome and it doesn't look like Gameboy game, so that's a good thing aswell. Closest game to compare it to, would be few years old arena/moba game called Demigod. Or just look at the screenshots or watch a trailer... :)

Items all have passive effects, so you will not forget to activate ze_item that could win the fight or save your life in the last second.

Minions do something. I mean, they actualy do damage in all stages of the game. Also no last hitting, you get money/xp for being near them, as they die. Towers do damage, sometimes... if they are not on cooldown - they have overheat system.

Achievements work. I don't care myself, but hey, some people are into this stuff. :P

Monetization is not pay2win, and the game is on sale already, after 3 days from release.

Character design looks unique and nice. You can pretty much see and feel from the visuals what that character is and probably what he does.


Mixed opinions of mine section, about what I personaly are on the edge with or dislike. This is obviously the long part, because we all can spot and describe the bad parts easier.

Big number of dummy skills. Skill-shots and aiming is for babies, who needs that stuff. What can I say, I'm a sarcastic fellow. I also think that skillshots are much better design philosophy, both in terms of gameplay flow, balance and rewarding the player. :P

Item system. I don't mind much, that it is way too simplified, as everything costs 500 gold. There are 15 items split into 3 categories with 2 tier branch. My problem is, that there is not much choise. Some of the items are not worth getting over others, as you can get better item (balance issue). To expand on this items can be stat-wise useless (their unique passive parts - who wants 2% speed buff for 2 sec when you get attacked... if you are and you can apply permanent slow for 30% - and making this item meaningless, because its so good that everyone gets it).

Role system and hero balance. This is very similiar to HotS. Heroes are split into 4 categories, translated - hero killer, tank, support and minion slayer. General ideas are, that Hero Killers have high damage output, low health and no CC; Tanks have no damage, supreme health and crapton of CC; Supports have mediacore everything; Minion slayers kill minions and sometimes punch you in the face. This also means that each category gets stats from being in that category up to the point that items form about 10-15% of those overall stats. In theory this creates tri-force balance circle (with mushroom tiered minion slayers) that cliche of A counters B -> C -> A. The problem is, that heroes are not very well balanced. For instance there is a tank that deals more damage (although overtime) with 4 health items, than Hero Killer with full on dps build, meanwhile if you focus the tank, you are doing it wrong because his backline kills you, if you don't focus him, he CC's and kills your backline and then you. Overall, the balance is all over the place, ranged heroes seem to be dominating everything, unless you somehow manage to get to them and use your 4 CC abilities on them and hope your team will be capable of doing damage. This very much reminds me of HotS balance into extreme, where roles are set in stone and it's more about your team comp, not your adaptability in-game, so many games are decided before they even start (considering players are relatively on same skill level).

Progression system. Do you like playing hundered of games to unlock a hero? Do you like unlocking talents and hero specific upgrades, while matchmaking throws you against players that have such things already (sometimes even of high grind tier). This game is for you.

Ok, now the worst part. Missing stuff and bugs. The supremely bad part of unforgiveable things.

Options menu. It pretty much does not have any and reminds me of bad mobile ports. You can set windowed/fullscreen, smart cast, rebind keys, few graphic presets and sound on/off. There is no choise to disable certain effects, decrease texture quality, turn off shadows, tweak AA or even lower your volume level.

Bugs, not the cute ones from Isaac. Alright... here, we, go. Some item passives do not work - even more lowering the number of viable items. Client is generaly very poorly optimized - very long loadings in first game and randomly in others and FPS is not ideal considering the game's graphical fidelity, there are issues with... being stuck on loading into the client, UI being stuck and not working, being stuck in tutorial screen, being stuck in confirming match screen, being stuck in hero selection screen, game crashing for some people and being unable to reconnect to the game (from ~40 games, I had about 50% chance to have one of the people not connecting, leaving or being afk), the friend system does not work very well and needs game restart (idealy for both people), some people encounter lags to a point of game being unplayable, sometimes your 3-free-hero-quest-line thing will get stuck, the progression lists will not update until you restart the game. In-game inconsistencies as, dashes and leaps will sometimes not get you to maximum or designated destination/target (yes, there are on-target gap closing abilities). Otherwise, the in-game stuff is alright.

A little note, the game released two patches two days ago, that we're of the game's size alone and no patch notes were released for them.

Rant over.

So far I would not recommend the game, better wait until the game gets few fixes, extends it's options and balance passes get in. So far, this seems more like a beta product.

Recommendations for similiar/better games?

Heroes of the Storm - it's pretty much the same thing, but without majority of the bad things.

Bloodline Champions - because everything is skillshot. Even autoattacks and heals. Although I wonder if the game is still alive.

LoL/DotA/SMITE/STRIFE, etc - anything you have fun with. :P