Smite is ... not fun. I say this as someone that has a very rocky relationship with MOBAs in general, having only started to play League of Legends a few months ago. I heard that Smite was a good console MOBA, and all the Smite fans brag about it being much more fun, that the graphics are great, and the third person camera makes things exciting. So, naturally, I tried it out. Boy, areSmite is ... not fun. I say this as someone that has a very rocky relationship with MOBAs in general, having only started to play League of Legends a few months ago. I heard that Smite was a good console MOBA, and all the Smite fans brag about it being much more fun, that the graphics are great, and the third person camera makes things exciting. So, naturally, I tried it out. Boy, are those people brain damaged.
First off, the MOBA aspect almost feels secondary to the Arena mode where you start at level 3 (having all of your basic abilities) and just brawl with other players. The whole defending turrets and killing minions stuff isn't even covered by the opening tutorial. You have to learn about that all on your own. Which I did by firing up a few training matches, just me vs the AI. In both games I played, my teammates, who are the same AI we're fighting against, died twice as much as I did leading to ridiculous enemy attacks. I didn't do well either, but the fact the GAME played worse than itself speaks volumes.
The second thing is that the game is terribly balanced compared to something like League. See, you defend these things that shoot enemies if they get close, and they're kinda like safe spaces. If the enemy decides to fight you while you're near one, they're almost guaranteed to lose unless they kill you very fast. In my two matches playing as a Warrior in the solo lane, my opponent would engage me under my turret, and lived for dozens of seconds. In my first match it was Odin, whose constant shielding prevented him from taking any damage ever. That's not fair. In no universe of MOBA should a character be able to stand on top of an objective and survive for half a minute and still have HP left to lane. This was with me and the turret attacking, mind you.
I could write this off as a one off issue, maybe Odin's too powerful in this current patch, I don't know. Games like these are always changing. What I do know is that at no point in my hour of playing did I have any kind of fun, which is what I had when I started League of Legends. League of Legends gives you a bunch of well placed items, "Take these first, then these, and maybe these." It's all laid out easy for you. In Smite I was spending minutes at the start of a match reading what items did what because the game just kinda throws this list at you without organizing it. You have a couple rows of items with "Core" and "Situational" over them. League? Starting items you take when the match starts, those go into the second tier, and then the final tier, with some extra ones below that. It was impossible to understand, and the way everything was displayed it took me literal minutes to sit there and read item descriptions and learn what did what. And to top it all off, I didn't find a way to see what they enemy had, so I never knew what the hell to build to counter them. In League you hold down Tab. In Smite on PS4... I have no idea, I tried every button that wasn't labeled, and even then, if I found it, there's no way scrolling through the entire enemy's gear is as fast with a controller as it would be with a mouse. Controllers are just no way to play MOBAs.
Finally, and most importantly, during the early lane phase, where you sit around and fight minions and try to get more gold than the enemy? Every melee champ I played was awkwardly floaty, sliding around as I attacked, meaning you started attacks and then moved into position most of the time. It felt weird and like I had much less control than I really did. It made the simple process of holding down R2 to swing repeated feel uneasy. And this comes from someone that's only barely gotten used to clicking four or five different things to attack them in a top down PC game. I've played more console games than PC, but somehow Smite just feels awkward and unfinished. Which really came into play with hitting things. In League there's a cacophony of sounds that accompany hitting things. I've never adjusted the volume. When I shoot it makes a loud noise, when I hit something there's a satisfying pop, when they die I hear coins clinking, and all of my abilities make good sounds to let me know I'm using them. Smite? I could hammer every button and not tell you if something came out or not because they're almost no sound, enemies just stand there and take damage without flinching, again, it feels unfinished compared to League, and Smite is like six years old now. It shouldn't feel THIS BAD to HIT THINGS. But it does, plain and simple.
Sorry for all the fans that think clicking is too much work and top down "cartoonish" graphics suck, but Smite fails to be engaging on the most basic level. Fricking Mario has better sounds when he hits a goomba than my character did hitting 8 guys with a hammer. That's a problem, people. Nothing was broken, but it wasn't fun.… Expand
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