Solstice Arena

Being a huge fan of the MOBA genre, I found myself coming across Solstice Arena, a title developed by a very familiar company known as Zynga. Zynga is known to be a company that makes mostly free-to-play online type of games, such as Farmville, with small micro-transaction on the side, but overall, having a huge following. Solstice Arena in many ways can fall into this category directly; however, it focuses on a much larger audience now that it's on Steam.

Solstice Arena is focused entirely on Hero vs. Hero combat, like DOTA and League of Legend. However, instead of a 5v5 battle arena, with three routes taking a direct path to the bases, Solstice Arena on the other hand is a 3v3 arena with a single route taking to each of the bases and is far more linear. In addition, there are no such things as creeps within Solstice, in which, the only combat throughout each of the matches will be among the players.

The towers differentiate greatly as well. Each base has a total of five towers guarding their base. One tower is positioned at the start of the base, two towers are behind the first one, and the strongest tower is at the back, protecting where your squad spawns. Destroying all of the towers for either bases results in a victory, however, during my playthrough, I tried to destroy the last tower on the enemies base with no success, and regardless of my level. In addition to this, it's not possible to spawn kill heroes, as each hero base is protected by a barrier of sort, and each team has the decision to surrender, something which was very much appreciated by me.

In terms of the actual combat as opposed to the map design, each player picks a hero. That hero has abilities themselves which only seem to be activated, and those heroes fall under a certain type. Those types are split into five different categories, cool down for abilities, increase damage, faster movement, more health, and finally, attack speed. Within the match, there are small orbs to be collected in order to boost one of those categories for both bases. These orbs do make a difference at the start of the match, but by the end, they are pointless, as the bonus they give you are miniscule.

Most of the time, in order for a team to win, that team has to collect the most gold before the other team does, but at the same time decimating them. Zynga, made this easier for all of the players by placing a chest in the middle of the map in order for players to gain the advantage and quickly earn money in order to finish off the other team. By the time whichever team wins against the other, the match is usually decided, as no matter how much farm one team tries to attain against the other, it's nearly impossible to win, as the team who won the first fight usually bought not only items, but also have better stats as compared to other MOBA's.

In terms of the heroes, there's a cast of 23 available heroes, and most of which have several costumes. However, not all of the heroes are available right from the start, actually, only a single one is available, and in order to actually unlock him for online matches, rather than bot matches, is by having to play that specific hero for around five matches. To unlock the other characters, players either have to have played a certain number of matches and gain points from them, or spend money themselves in order to unlock them. I found both of these features to be a tad bit disappointing, as even though the core game and it's features may be great, the way to unlock these characters are a big downer unless you decide to pay, as trying to earn those money would easily take over 40 or more matches per character.

Overall, Solstice Arena is interesting, as most of the matches themselves take less than 20 minutes. It's a good amount of competitive fun in short burst and with the addition to surrender during a matches is a plus. It's definitely worth playing if you're a fan of MOBAs and don't like dealing with the amount of time it takes, or if you're up for a friendlier competitive match.