MOBA Gamers

What's this? Oh, it's a top secret awesome DOTA successor? Yeah.

It's a game that has been brewing in beta for some time now. It's a game that has every possibility of becoming the next big thing for DotA Gamers everywhere. It's a game that, until now, has kept very quiet. It's called Heroes of Newerth, and the tiger has just been let out of its cage.

Heroes of Newerth is one of the latest offspring of the most popular Warcraft 3 Custom map - Defense of the Ancients. It's a standalone game created by S2 Games, who you may remember from the glory days of the niche hit Savage.

So, lets talk about the beta. The map? Exactly like DOTA. Rivers, runes, and a giant ape where the giant golem Roshan was. It's got every creep spawn and every nuance down to the letter. The heroes? Well, many of them are direct translations from everyone's favorite DOTA heroes – from Pudge to Clockwerk, they can be found here with their skillsets intact and unchanged. There's some new offerings as well, playing up new abilities that couldn't or wouldn't work under the constraints of the Warcraft 3 program – such as the Dark Lady, whose ultimate ability actually blinds your foes, so your team can pick them off while they scurry for cover.

Other new faces include the Puppetmaster, who can spawn a voodoo doll of a foe of his choice, then beat on it to smash the target with a serious amount of damage. Then there's the owl, Zephyr – with his combination of excellent farming abilities and a projectile reflecting shield, players are still adapting to both playing with him and against him.

Items? Yep, they have been brought back, piece for piece. The names have changed, but they're all there. Instead of a ring of health, you've got the lifetube. Instead of the butterfly, you've got the wingbow.

So if it's just a carbon copy of DOTA, why even bother? The graphics are obviously much upgraded as the Warcraft 3 client is seven years old, but what else?

For starters – disconnect recovery. If you happen to have your client crash or your ISP leave you hanging, you have five minutes to rejoin your game and reconnection is smooth and easy. The number of ruined DOTA games due to disconnect is a figure so astronomical it defies numbers.

Next up, stat tracking and all that entails – your kills, your deaths, your assists, your ratios, your average XP per game and much much more are all meticulously calculated from game to game. Oh, and possibly the most important thing is tracked – the amount of games you leave.

That's right folks, you can now screen your games for leavers. When DOTAdude1337 joins your game, you can see he's played 70 games and left 50 of them. Even better, you can create your game so that only people with a certain “None leaver” percentage can join up. The leavers won't even be able to join it.

There's no question about it. If you're a DOTA fan, this game is for you.