First Impressions: Dropzone
Me and RTS games generally don’t go together. It’s not that I don’t enjoy them, I’m just not all that good at them. Admittedly a lot of that is just not having a lot of time to put into them while another reason is just not figuring out what I need to build in what order in a timly manner. When I got the opportunity to check out Gameforge’s new RTS Dropzone, I was somewhat surprised to find out that it doesn’t quite work like the typical RTS games I’m used to such as Star Craft and Command and Conquer. Instead it reminds me more of MOBAs like Heroes of the Storm or League of Legends, though I’ve never played a MOBA so I’m going on purely what I’ve seen on live streams. That said, here are my first impressions of the closed beta of Dropzone.
To start off with, instead of building various constructs and armies like you do in traditional RTSs, in Dropzone you control a squad of three mechs and you have to collect cores. This is done by defeating enemies scattered around the maps which will drop the cores for your mechs to pick up. Each mech can only have one core at a time and to count towards your score, you have to upload the cores at a central upload point. Sounds simple enough but at the same time, another team of three is trying to accomplish the same task. Each mech has special abilities they can use as well as their standard attack, plus they can attack opposing mechs to kind of prevent them from gaining any cores. Whoever has the most amount of cores uploaded in fifteen minutes wins the match.
While on the main menu you can choose to purchase new items or pilots, then head over to the Build option and change up the layouts for your pilots. You begin with nine pilots split into three categories: Tanks, Mechanics, and Gunners, and each one has three slots for activated abilities (Body, Weapon, and Utility) and three slots for passive abilities (Class, Propulsion, and Offensive). These can be customized however you wish so no two teams of mechs will likely be the same unless your opponent thinks the exact same way as you do. Once all of that is set, it’s time to head out to the main game…kind of.
This is probably where my major nitpick lies right now in that there’s no campaign. Your battle options are the tutorial, practice, and matchmaking. As of this post I haven’t done any matchmaking yet as I’m still trying to get the hang of the game in practice. The tutorial does an okay job of running you through the absolute basics, but what really irked me at first was when it told me to do something and I saw nothing on the field. The camera was situated in the center of the map and I couldn’t move it, yet I had to move my mech somewhere on the field. Kind of hard to move something that isn’t there, right? Well the mechs are there, but you have to hit “1” on the keyboard to select it…which the game doesn’t tell you so I initially thought the tutorial was glitched.
When you’re ready for a skirmish you can choose to practice. This will have you select your three pilots like in Matchmaking, and go one-on-one…or rather three-on-three with an AI controlled opponent who chooses the exact same layout as you do. As of right now, this is the only single player option in the game; the rest is in Matchmaking. That said I will dive into Matchmaking for the final review, but as of right now I am finding this game interesting. It’s just going to take me a while to get used to it as it wasn’t what I was expecting when I heard the game was an RTS. Again, it feels more like an arena game than an RTS, but we’ll see how things go in the next week.
