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Awesomenauts
PC (Steam)
Borat Could Make a Joke on the Title…
2.5/5 stars
“Awesomenauts” is the second game published by Ronimo Games, an Indie outfit better known as the developer of the uninspired casual RTS title, “Swords & Soldiers.” Things are clearly going insane in the world of Indie games, though, as Ronimo is not the actual developer of “Awesomenauts,” but is merely publishing it for an even less reputable outfit, DTP Entertainment.
“Awesomenauts” itself is a brazen attempt at breaking into the relatively-new MOBA (Multi-player Online Battle Arena) genre, which is a new-school distillation of the competitive online RTS matches that gained popularity on PC with the rise of the Internet in the 1990s. However, in trying to change-up the quickly-stagnating MOBA formula, “Awesomenauts” manages to stand out, while still remaining as typically bland as any other PvP-centric game.
Presentation
“Awesomenauts” has a lot of style and personality oozing out of every seam. The diverse cast of insane and quirky characters look like rejects from (or caricatures of) the cast of a 1980s Saturday Morning cartoon. And nobody can accuse the game of falling into the trap of brown & gray color pallets that so many modern games do, as there is very little in the game’s environmental and character designs that isn’t Day-Glo bright.
Audio is likewise a well-done homage to children’s entertainment of the 80s. The voice talent used across the large cast of playable Awesomenauts perfectly matches the characters, and the omnipresent narrator sounds like a retired WWF (before it was WWE) announcer or Mountain Dew spokesman. I especially love how he intentionally uses the wrong grammar when excitedly announcing, ‘A enemy has been killed!’ Each character also has their own epic theme song to go along with the “Awesomenauts” main theme, but the music that plays during the actual matches is far too muted to really stick in the mind.
Story
“In the year 3587, conflict spans the stars. Huge armies are locked in an enduring stalemate. Only one force can help them now: The Awesomenauts!”
And so begins – and ends – the narrative qualities of “Awesomenauts.” Outside of a brief tutorial with a distressing overuse of the word ‘always,’ “Awesomenauts” doesn’t really have anything going for it from a story basis. Sure, each character has a paragraph blurb or backstory, but there’s no real mention of their past interactions with each other, and the entire point of the game is simply to push a stalemate conflict in one direction or the other.
“Awesomenauts” is disappointingly devoid of anything resembling a campaign mode, which would have been a great way to teach new players the ropes while also building up character personalities and possible alliances or rivalries between any of the cast of characters. The game is unapologetically obsessed with PvP to the detriment of all else.
Gameplay
The MOBA genre may have been spawned from the moldering remains of the once-common RTS genre, but “Awesomenauts” is an entirely different breed of MOBA. Instead of a top-down click-fest with dozens of redundant hotkeys, “Awesomenauts” is a 2D sidescroller that is best played with an Xinput controller.
Each round of gameplay involves a team of 3 Awesomenauts taking on an opposing team of 3 Awesomenauts. Players on the same team can’t select the same character, but it is possible to play against evil dopplegangers on the opposing side. Each map has two or three possible routes – called Lanes – that connect the two teams’ Bases. In MOBA fashion, each Base automatically spawns significant numbers of mindless AI Drones – typically called Creeps – that relentlessly walk in a straight line and attempt to destroy whatever stationary defenses they encounter – in this case, Automated Turrets. If left alone, each team’s Base would produce Drones forever, while the Drones themselves would meet in the center of the battlefield and kill each other off, leading to the game’s ‘enduring stalemate.’ It is up to players to change the flow of battle – typically referred to as a Push – in one direction or the other, leading to the eventual destruction of the impeding Automated Turrets opening a direct path to the enemy’s Base and the precious mining drill housed within. Destroying this drill ends the match.
And that’s pretty much all there is to the game. The only thing that adds any actual depth to this simple formula is the diversity of the playable characters themselves… and there is a lot of it. There are Awesomenauts that fit into every traditional MOBA role, with wildly different skill sets. Each Awesomenaut has two special abilities that need to be unlocked before using them, and there are upgrade trees for both special abilities, the character’s default attack, and miscellaneous passive abilities (4 skill trees total for each character). While each character’s skill trees start with three available upgrades, by grinding experience (read: playing matches over and over and over) the player can unlock an additional two upgrades on each and every skill tree.
Of course, because it is a MOBA and not an RPG, all of the skill tree unlocks are ephemeral, lasting only the duration of a single match. Players must rebuild their character’s setup during each and every game by collecting the in-game currency – Solar – and spending it at a vending machine in their base (hopefully while there is a lull in the fighting). Thus every game devolves into a predictable pattern of Early Game (where players avoid each other and focus on whoring as much Solar as possible in order to unlock upgrades), Mid-Game (where Awesomenauts actively engage each other in an attempt to Push the battle to the enemy’s side of the stage), and Late Game (where one side is clearly winning and the other side would probably just give up… if the game was decent enough to include a ‘Concede’ button, which it does not).
The repetitive nature of “Awesomenauts” made me feel like I’d seen everything the game has to offer after a single session. Sure, I could ‘practice’ to ‘get better’ at controlling the characters in order to ‘compete,’ but I have zero interest in any of that. Thankfully, “Awesomenauts” does at least include an offline mode, split-screen coop, and AI bots to battle against instead of just dumping players into the lion’s den as soon as they create a profile. If it didn’t have these features, it would be utterly worthless to an anti-PvP-er like me.
Overall
A cheetah can’t change its spots, and a MOBA can’t change its nature as a PvP experience. Players who hate PvP as much as I do have little-to-no reason to bother with “Awesomenauts,” as the repetitive nature of the core gameplay gets old quickly. Without a campaign to engage players who aren’t engaged by the ‘thrill’ of competition, “Awesomenauts” falls flat, despite its great potential for quirky weirdness.
Borat: Dis game, it’s AWESOME… not!
Presentation: 4.5/5
Story: 0.5/5
Gameplay: 2.5/5
Overall (not an average): 2.5/5
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