Released on the 20th of May, 2020, the Amazon Game Studios published MOBA game, Crucible, doesn’t exactly bring anything new to the table. Crucible is a multiplayer game with hero style characters very similar to those in Overwatch and a couple of other games. If you enjoy playing MOBA games, you may find Crucible way too familiar for comfort. 

The game is a melting pot of multiple gaming ideas into one, but it fails to carve a peculiarity for itself.

The game is set on another planet with three game modes played on the same map. The first and probably the most interesting is the Heart of the Hive. This mode focuses on pitting player teams against themselves in a 4v4 race to hunt and collect three hive hearts from the periodically spawning hazardous hives. The other mode, the Alpha Hunters mode, features short battles between two teams. The final mode being the Harvester Command mode. In this game mode, players get their recompense from individual kills. All these modes allow a player to choose any of the ten game characters, each of which packs separate skill sets.

The marquee mode is the Heart of the Hive mode. In this mode, both teams are made to battle themselves while also trying to hunt down the hives in a bid to get their hearts. The first team to gain three hearts wins. Albeit, the opposing team isn’t the only enemy you’ll be facing; the game is built such that the player is pitched against the environment. Experience points, or XPs for short, can be gained by killing more AI enemies. The major setback with this mode is that the enemies are so easy to kill; they do not pose much of a threat. Their attacks are so predictable that one can take on a large number of them at once without much stress. This takes out the fun off the XP farming. It gets particularly deplorable considering that most of your time in the course playing this mode would be spent fighting these enemies. 

A faceoff with opponents from the other team rarely ever happens except when both teams are competing for a hive. In these showdowns, death can come at very high costs due to the 30-seconds respawn time that comes after each death. Most times, a comeback is almost an exercise in futility because it takes lesser time for the other team to capture the hive than for a player to respawn and get back to the hive. The map used in this game is too huge, even for eight players. So most times, a player just keeps running around in circles waiting for the character’s mobility abilities to cool down.

The good news is that not all game characters are affected by this problem. For instance, Tosca is equipped with dashes and little cooldown periods, making him most efficient when you need to zap about during a fight. This is quite consistent with the fact that the character is a squirrel, although I kind of find it cliché that a squirrel is endowed with speed. Another character, Earl, has a jetpack allowing him to fly around. Flame throwing Summer and brawler Drakhal both can take short dashes.

Other characters have other interesting abilities that might take some getting used to. Sazan can alternate between three weapons during a fight. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each weapon while swapping through weapons and letting the other recharge is key to perfecting Sazan. Bugg is also another fun character that becomes immensely useful when facing an overly ambitious opponent. It has the ability to wreak havoc without necessarily firing shots. On the other hand, you may find heroes exhilarating. For instance, the long-range weapons of heroes like Mendoza can be frustrating if used against an enemy from a long distance. This steals the pleasure that comes with executing a perfect shot from a long distance. Whatever frustration you feel may be linked to Crucible’s lack of an interactive visual language. The only indication that an enemy was affected by the hit is the reduction in the life bar of such an enemy.

While Crucible allows a player to select his/her gaming character, sadly, this option is only available at the start of the game. You cannot change your character after you have been added to a team. The disadvantage of this is that more often the case than not, a player may find himself in a lopsided team where character selection is purely based on the individual player’s style of play. Should you happen to be in a balanced team, Crucible presents yet another setback. There is no medium for in-game communication. The reason for this being that the developers may have been trying to eliminate toxic behavior from within the game. It is, however, almost impossible to enjoy such a game without communication between the team members.

In the second mode, Harvester Command, this lack of communication may be overlooked, considering that the mode centers on team kills as against the collective team fights. Also, the increase in the number of players in a team, from four to eight team members, makes the scene appear busier.

Lastly, Alpha Hunter mode pits players against each other in pairs of two. The major advantage of this mode brings to the table is that in the eventuality of a loss of a teammate, the mode allows you to enter into a new alliance with another player in a similar position. Although when it gets down to the final three players, it becomes a free-for-all.

In closing, whatever values the developers sought to give through the characters of the game is lost and mitigated through the poor third-person action experience. For an action game, Crucible’s poor amalgamation of different gaming ideas creates a conflicting mesh. It is a game that contradicts itself at every turn and is generally boring.