Awesomenauts has been around since 2012. It was praised upon its release for being a MOBA without all the technical hassle. While the core MOBA mechanics exist; take towers and push forward your NPC’s whilst killing opponents, the pace was vastly increased and stylised to suit much newer players to the genre.
In steps Awesomenauts: Overdrive. The second series expansion bringing a small handful of new characters to the table: Lux-5000, Chucho Krokk and Professor Yoolip. For now we will focus on these characters, and I will discuss why later.
The three characters are uniquely diverse to the rest of the cast. Lux-5000 brings a slow-but-steady melee style in a modified bruiser role. Chucho, by far the most unique, boasts speed and flying ability with his motorcycle, which can be used as a defensive unit when called off. While not actively powerful, a small amount of time will have you utilising this active playstyle well. Professor Yoolip fills the typical support role, able to stun enemies and add extra NPC units to support turret attacks. While not all characters are entirely unique from the current cast, Lux-5000 feels a lot like Skolldir and Chucho feels a lot like Yuri and Vinnie, Yoolip especially opens up a whole new tactical option for your team to take great advantage of. Currently some character feel a bit overpowered compared to others, but given time this should even out.
We also have a visual overhaul to bring the game into more modern graphical capabilities. There is some complete overhauling of various characters. Particular praise goes to the new art design on Lonestar which is a welcome overhaul. However this overhaul is not everywhere, and several characters have been neglected in this improvement.
However now we must go on to the bad. The only bad I see is that there just isn’t much for the money. In the message sent with my code two extra features were soon to be added: completely overhauled matchmaking and the community-designed Ix the Interloper which appears to be free to everyone. Now matchmaking has long been a contentious point in the game and the developer still has yet to deliver on promises such as the Starstorm map. Sending me details of these two extras in the press release with my code seems to be filibustering on what is a rather small piece of DLC.
This isn’t the game-changing expansion it may have been presumed to be, and boiled down this is simply a character pack. A hardcore fan of the game will probably buy this, as is the MOBA way, and a casual player will probably pass it by. The characters, if a little overpowered currently, add nice new tactics to the experience, and the visual overhaul is welcome if limited. While this expansion gets a solid 7/10, this is certainly not what the Awsomenauts community wanted.
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