Warlander Should be your Next Free-to-Play Game Article

gamingnexus.com:

Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas, or MOBAs for short, don’t get a lot of shine on consoles these days, and in a weird way it feels as if the entire genre has a negative aura around it. Perhaps that is why developer Toylogic and publisher PLAION have been marketing their free-to-play MOBA Warlander largely as a “team-based warfare game”, which turned out to be a small stroke of marketing genius, as it roped in this MOBA skeptic to give the game a shot. I must admit, I am surprised at how much I like it, and it’s the game I kept going back to during my weekend play sessions.

So, what do you do in Warlander? That’s where the MOBA influences come in. Depending on the game mode, two or five teams battle for control of the map by taking over towers (which act as spawn points) and ultimately you are trying to destroy the enemy team’s core, which is located at their castle on the opposite side of the map. I stuck to the 40-player two-team mode, because it got the hooks in me early. One neat feature of Warlander is that you get to vote on overall team strategy and each squad’s mission pre-match. Perhaps you think the team should play aggressively for a match, so you vote to have extra assault squads and only one squad of defenders. As for squads, you can vote on which role you would like your squad to have in the upcoming battle – attackers, special ops, or defenders. Attackers and defenders are self-explanatory, while special ops are responsible for capturing and controlling spawn points to help push your team forward. The whole system works well and forces the team to work together; there is also one player designated as a commander to keep squads on-task.

If there is one thing that any free-to-play game has to get right it is first impressions, and Warlander pulls it off. It’s easy to pick-up and play, handling a lot like your typical third-person hack-and-slash game, with each character class having basic attacks and multiple abilities. There are three unique classes: