The unique feature of a desert isn't sand, or heat, however absence. It's among those picky middle school factoids which reaches just best for irritating others; nobody needs to listen to your protestations about Antarctica's low yearly precipitation at Pub Trivia Tuesday. However it comes to mind when walking through Amorra, the setting of the real-time strategy game Frozen Hearth. Much like the Antarctic, Amorra is an iced-over desert of absence. However where one lacks rainfall, the other can be found looking for other qualities. Like creativity. Or creativity. Or specialized proficiency. Or the imaginative style anticipated of a finished product. To play Frozen Hearth is to self-deprive, to go without the fundamental aspects of a good game ecosystem.
To be fair, desolation is essential to Frozen Hearth's premise. The land of Amorra is trapped by the Shangur, a group of demons like Starcraft's Zerg race with an ice-themed makeover. The Shangur go about covering the world in a deadly cold-creep, however an assemblage of feuding human clans put aside their differences to better battle their common enemy. As one of the Avatars, tribal warriors who stand about twice as tall as an average person (eat your heart out, James Cameron), you guide the tattered remains of humankind into determined battle against the premature winter.
Frozen Hearth is a direct blend of a conventional real-time strategy game and a multiplayer online battle arena of Dota's ilk. Armies are raised and well trained, and aimed all over the hills and plains of reduced in size battlefields from on high. The aim is to destroy the enemy's stronghold--the base living in the alternative corner of the shaped field of play. Avatars, for their part, function as the hero characters of Frozen Hearth's MOBA half, imbued with greater strength than a run-of-the-mill unit and a host of means and abilities which will turn the tide of a skirmish. Avatars can gain experience and level up, unlocking or enhancing their skills to heal or buff their allies, or attack or stun their foes. Stripped-down variations of base building and resource accumulating round out the strategic conditions. Bases are restricted to a single structure, split up into partitions for specialized renovations. Nodes that dot the map supply a steady drip of supplies for units and enhancements, and a tactical goal for you skirmish over.
One more bit of middle school pedantry is the distinction "simple" and "simplistic"--one agnostic, the other frightening.
Games have long battled to land on the appropriate side of that dividing line; regrettably, Frozen Hearth veers in the wrong direction. It starts with a low-grade simulacra of other middle ages fantasy strategy games, and just gets rid of components from the formula. Take the paring-down of traditional base-building technicians, for instance. It definitely simplifies the RTS, however it is also basic. There are just a couple of rote renovations which can be made, to be placed into the preordained spaces of the larger structure. Without any territorial development, there's little reason to split forces, save to quickly distract enemy forces. Absolutely nothing upends the core gameplay loop of spamming units and directing them toward the closest contested resources.
