Last month, Vela Games’ competitive PvE arena game Evercore Heroes launched its closed beta. Back in May 2023, I had the opportunity to test out the game with the development team, but this time around there wasn’t any handholding.
Without the support of a team who knows what they’re doing or even a voice-chat requirement, my experience with Evercore Heroes was vastly different this time around. While I still believe the game has potential, it’s become increasingly obvious that sections of the core gameplay loop are still unclear and anticlimactic.
Fundamentally, Evercore Heroes is essentially a PvE MOBA despite the fact that the studio shies away from both the MOBA and MMO identifiers. The game consists of forming a team of four, which usually includes a healer, tank and a variety of damage dealers (although I’m sure someone will find a creative way to break this mold).
After your team if formed, players will traverse a large battleground killing monsters to earn gold to buy items or completing objectives to earn Luum, which serves as a protective shield for your core. Efficiently choosing targets on the map can provide a huge edge to your team as more items will allow you to repel stronger enemies and the team with the least Luum if often eliminated first. That being said, individual and team skill can overcome early misplays or shortcomings and it’s not uncommon for a team to make a big comeback.
One of the big problems with Evercore Heroes currently, however, is that it’s not very intuitive. The first couple of games I played by myself, I just tried to follow my team around because I hadn’t learned the objectives yet. This can work out okay if there’s a veteran player or two in your team, but I quickly found out that if no one else on your team knows what’s going on either, you’re going to be eliminated right away.
With a big, open map that has no player-controlled objectives, Evercore Heroes isn’t straightforward. In MOBAs, you pick a lane and usually stick to it for a while. If you encroach on a lane someone else is supposed to be playing, they’ll usually tell you (not always nicely), but at least there’s some direction. In MMO battlegrounds, objectives are usually brightly marked and consist of things like resource nodes, bases or other points of interest that the game makes very clear.
The other thing I found to be a major issue is the lack of information available about anything that’s going on. As someone who has played a lot of MOBAs, I find having information about your enemies to be highly important. There should be a way to at least see the items the enemy teams are building or at least things like maximum health or DPS related statistics. Despite having some disruptive options in the game, it mostly feels like you’re just playing with your own team even though you’re really facing off against three other teams.
This sentiment carries over to the core defense and endgame scenarios. At certain intervals, you’ll need to teleport back to your core to defend it from increasingly difficult waves of enemies until one team’s core falls. This will happen twice and then the final mission will either have both teams facing off against a boss or against each other by defending against waves once again while sending powerful enemies to attack their opponent. The thing is there’s not really a lot of tension built up at any point; typically you’ll be so focused on what you’re doing that you won’t notice each team’s core taking damage or the positions on the Luum rush slightly changing.
Even when it comes to the final boss you just kind of either win or lose and then the game ends. There isn’t the same kind of tension in fighting an MMORPG boss that enrages and wipes out half your team just as you finish it off, and you don’t have to worry about the other team like you would killing Baron Nashor or some other big MOBA boss. The tension of attacking or defending that final push to a core just isn’t the same and sometimes it’s hard to tell if the match was actually close or you got blown out of the water.
I think if both teams were side-by-side and you could see what your opponents were doing it would be more competitive and be able to learn from them. Furthermore, most disruptive abilities are disabled at this point, so if one team gets ahead there’s literally nothing you can do besides hope they mess up. Having more options to negatively impact the enemy team would make the boss fight much more interesting than charging objectives to get a small power boost.
That being said, the game itself is rather impressive from a technology standpoint. There isn’t a lot of lag and the performance is quite good despite supporting 16 players with 4 instances of the battleground running simultaneously. While there could definitely be better audio and visual feedback for auto-attacks and skills, the physical responsiveness is quite good. Performance is one of the most important factors for a game of this style and I can think of more than one MOBA where poor performance was a death knell.
In its current stage, Evercore Heroes still has a lot of promise. The heroes themselves are fun to play and visually / mechanically unique enough. The biggest things the game needs are a better new player experience, whether that’s a series of in-game tutorials or better hints as to what objectives to do next. In-game gear recommendations would also be a nice touch as you usually only have a few seconds to stop at the shop before waves of monsters start charging your core.
Finally, there still needs to be a lot of polish in the sound and hit feedback department. However, Evercore Heroes has managed to do something completely different. Whether that sticks with the gaming community at large, we’ll have to wait for the official release.
