Heroes of Newerth

After laying down Defense of the Ancients back in early 2009, based of Aeon of Strife as earliest as I can tell, this game succeeded it.

The same game concept is re-used in here, but instead of being limited to the engine of Warcraft III, Heroes of Newerth has it's own one, allowing for many more things to be designed here, including a shop, better dedicated servers and voicechat amongst several positive things.

It borrows or steals(take your pick) hero concepts from DotA Allstars, which was maintained by Eul, Guinsoo and IceFrog throughout the years, while creating unique kinds of heroes on S2 Games's own. Sometimes, in present day, even the community gets the chance for their suggestions to be implemented.

Heroes such as Balphagore, Martyr, Ra and Engineer add their own original spin towards the established formula, making it all even more intricate, time demanding and enjoyable to know and use each of those. Especially newcomers, who know by now that the game has become F2P, if this is their first game based of DotA, prepare to get overwhelmed by the content, as well as the community.

That's right, the community is still as bad as I remember from the days of DotA, perhaps even worse, as vote kicking, conceding and constant yelling at the microphone or insulting, blaming, grieving and raging are ways to demotivate anyone. It is the only reason why Heroes of Newerth isn't an excellent game to pick up and play, because there are uncountable multiplayer games where the competition is still intact, yet way less badly emotional.

Heroes of Newerth can either be very entertaining, or very obnoxious, depending on the circumstances, most of all including your teammates and the enemies's. The best matches are usually those where the teams are equal in their overall strength, and they continue to clash, all 10 players available at once during battles.

There are plenty of sites nowadays which can explain how these kinds of games are played, including League of Legends, Demigod, Heroes of Newerth and the upcoming DotA 2, Realm of the Titans, Rise of the Immortals and Blizzard's own version of DotA. So I won't mention how it is played once again(I wrote a DotA blog at IGN already).

This sub-genre of action Real Time Strategy seems to have originated partly from Herzog Zwei for the Sega Genesis in 1989, although I cannot backup this claim. Anyway, enough with the history lesson.

If you are looking for a team based competitive online game which can be very enjoyable and which constantly gets updated with new content, balance changes and bug fixes, Heroes of Newerth would be a good start. Other current valuable options within the genre are still the ongoing DotA Allstars and most likely League of Legends(I haven't played it).