Heroes of Newerth Preview [PC]

Currently in closed beta, Heroes of Newerth (or HoN) is a multiplayer online action RPG based on the Warcraft III mod savage2 from S2 Games. If you've never played this mod let me give you a basic overview: You control a hero (of Newerth) on the side of the Legion (good guys) or Hellbourne (bad guys) and you have to help your NPC buddies destroy the other, all the while collecting gold to buy new items to make you faster, stronger and tougher. The trouble is that the other team of heroes are trying to do the same thing. The result? An exciting, challenging, frantic game that you'll find yourself playing "just one more game" until the sun rises (and I've done that twice this week already).

Heroes are split into two sides (Legion and Hellbourne) and three classes (Agility, Intelligent and Strength). Each hero has four skills, one of which is known as their "ultimate". To start a new game you pick from several game types: Normal; of which you can only select heroes from the side to which they belong, Random Draft; which randomly selects 20 heroes of which players take in turn to choose within a 25 second time-limit, Single Draft; one random hero from each class to choose from and finally Deathmatch; no respawns for downed heroes. On most of these modes you can request a swap with a team mate or even call for a re-pick, allowing you to pick a different hero at the expense of some starting gold; which is used to buy items from the shop. These are then further filtered by options to turn off the re-pick, the swap, Agility/Intelligence/Strength heroes, power-ups, the re-spawn timer and many more. The game types are varied enough to keep you wanting to play again with slightly different settings to keep things fresh, even if the beta only has three maps.

In a beta you expect a lot of issues, but in a closed beta you expect things to be holding together with sticky tape. However with HoN I managed to sign-up and log in with no issues and found myself looking at a extremely well presented interface. The cracks started to show when you look at the chat lists and see chat rooms with the same name, and the fact you can only join one of these chat rooms (I couldn't find a friend who was in the same channel because he was in the other instance of this room!). The menu hotkeys aren't explained well for the lobby either as pressing some of the function keys crashed the client, specifically the extra function keys which bring up alternative information such as the connection status. This is annoying as the F6 button brings up your friends list although this works fine.

The friends list itself is amazingly well done. When waiting for a game to start each player has a + sign next to their name. You can just click and they'll be added as a friend, while a notification is sent to inform them that you've added them. Outside of this menu you can click their name in any chat room and click "add to friends list" or search for them using a handy search box in your community menu. The advantage of being someones friend in HoN is many, as you can see when they're online or in a game, and this means they can quickly and easily join the same game. Fluent, simple, easy and good. You can access this menu with your friends list and chat messages by pressing F6 in-game or in the lobby. One of the few bugs I found is that if someone sends you an instant message while you are loading into a game you get a pop-up window in the bottom right hand side. If you click this, the screen goes a little mad until the game finishes loading. My only wish to improve on this would be to send messages to friends when they are offline, ready for when they get back on.