Heroes Of The Storm: Heroes Brawl Mode Kicks Off With Punisher Arena
Alright for fighting?
Heroes of the Storm's [official site] Heroes Brawl mode is out now marking a victory for consistent brand experiences across a multi-franchise media landscape. It's a rotating game mode where Blizzard switch up how you play and what heroes you can use and the like. They have similar modes in Hearthstone and Overwatch so you might be familiar with the concept from there.
I've tried it a grand total of one times and at the moment I think I'd rather just play normal HotS. Whether that's just because of the current flavour of Brawl or the mode itself I'm not sure.
So. The first Heroes Brawl is Punisher Arena. It's up until 28 October and you earn points by taking down opponents on an arena-style map. As the name suggests there are punishers, one representing each team, who are fighting one another in the centre and you can help take the opposing one down for 10 points. Hero kills will net you four points. First to 100 points wins and it's a best-of-three situation so you'll play more than one round regardless of who wins.
Heroes Brawl is not really clicking with me at the moment, but I think that's because I don't have a massive hero pool and the current mode made me pick between three randomly selected characters each time. In both rounds I got no-one I'm good at and the easiest level was medium, with most heroes being marked difficult. It wasn't exactly a great atmosphere in which to get to grips with the intricacies of anyone, I'll tell you that. It is also a mode where that matters far less - no-one flamed me for awfulness - but there was no way for me to latch into the match as I didn't feel like I was doing anything meaningful with the hero most of the time.
I think the thing that sticks out to me here (and do bear in mind this is only an impression after a single attempt) is that HotS matches proper don't take much time and, to me, don't feel hugely consequential so I find them easy to dip into anyway. As a result this particular brawl mode felt a bit odd. There wasn't much to persuade me that this was a reliably fun interlude in my gaming.
I'll probably wait for the cycle to move on to the next mode and see what that is. I will also add that I don't really feel drawn to the brawls in other Blizzard games either so it's entirely possible that they are simply not for me!
In other news, Warcraft's Samuro has been added to the HotS roster as a tricksy, stealthy blademaster:
