Victory Command

MOBAs: where heroes battle villains and where wizards tackle demons. For some, that's enough to put you off right there. If you're not a fan of warlocks and superpowers, there's plenty of reasons not to engage with the genre. For starters, it's super complicated and the path to expertise is long and full of mistakes. It's based around teams (usually five-strong) hitting lanes, taking out creeps and towers, and every player needs to be switched on and clued up if they're to avoid dragging their team down to the depths of defeat.

Victory Command is, for all intents and purposes, a MOBA. There's five players on each team, there's a symmetrical map (at least, the one we played on was, there may be others that are more randomly decorated) where players scrap it out in pursuit of victory. There is, however, plenty that differentiates it from the major players in the genre.

The game has been created by Petroglyph Games, a developer born from the ashes of Westwood Studios and who at the beginning of this year released Grey Goo, a solid science-fiction RTS. It's the studio's real-time strategy heritage that informs the major changes that separates Victory Command from the pack and gives it a unique flavour.

For starters, and perhaps most significantly, there's no respawns. Once your units are out of the game, they're out of the game. This is significant because it encourages more thoughtful and considered play, but it also speeds things up. Games tend to last between ten and fifteen minutes, much shorter than your standard game of Dota 2, for example.

Instead of controlling one character, players take the reins of a small squad of military units. There's a wide selection already on offer, and each of them can be upgraded over time via what looks a fairly deep skill tree. Each of the units has strengths and weaknesses, and Petroglyph quite clearly tells you which units you should be attacking, and which you should be avoiding like the plague.

Some of the units are comprised of three hulking tanks, while another might consist of twelve soldiers carrying anti-tank rockets. There's an elaborate game of paper, scissor, stone bubbling under the surface, and plenty to take in while you're getting to grips with the game (in that sense, it's very MOBA).

As we discovered during our very first game, it's also not particularly intuitive when considered from a realistic perspective. As your understanding builds you'll soon learn that certain groups of soldiers seriously overpower certain tank units, but at first - like we did - you might think your tanks will quickly overrun a group of soldiers caught out in the open; this simply isn't the case.

When your heavily armoured vehicles are being pulled apart by a small cadre of soldiers, you might find it a disconnecting experience. We imagined that troops would be much more fragile, counterbalanced by being significantly more plentiful. This isn't the case, and the resultant gameplay beats ground this firmly in MOBA territory. It might feature tanks and flamethrowers and rocket-firing militia, but there's still an element of fantasy to the action.

There's other options open to players. Before a game starts you can pick a drone to take into battle, as well as a perk that can aid your team long after you've departed the round. Players pick their units before joining the lobby, so there's the potential for randomly assembled teams with mismatched abilities. Hopefully when better community features are added (like friends lists) there'll be more potential for putting together more purposeful armies.

Victory Command certainly looks great. There's no gritty edge to this one, instead bright colours and a vivid colour palette. This design choice certainly feeds into the gameplay style, and a more realistic aesthetic would no doubt have created an even bigger divide between what's happening on screen, and what would happen in real life were some of these units to meet on the battlefield.

There's a few nice RTS features in there, such as the secondary objectives dotted around the map for both teams to capture, but make no mistake, this is a MOBA at its core. There's enough familiarity there for real-time strategy fans who are looking to branch out and find something to grab ahold of, but equally MOBA fans will quickly work out what's going on, and easily replace their solitary hero for the trio of tanks or the dozen soldiers that Victory Command offers.

Petroglyph is still balancing, but what's here feels polished and only in need of refinement. There's a premium account that you can buy that'll last for the duration of the Early Access period and that will grant you an increase in XP, however the base game is free and there's a healthy selection of unit types to experiment with, so in that sense it's an easy sell; if you've been waiting for a MOBA with a military slant, this is it, it's solid, and it's free to try.