Mobile Legends Bang Bang is a mobile MOBA game from Moonton games. As you can tell from the screenshot there’s literally nothing original about this game. I’m not being too hyperbolic here either. Moonton games was sued successfully by Tencent (partial owners of Riot’s League of Legends, and publishers of competing MOBA, Arena of Valor) for copyright infringement.
History
I’ve been playing Mobile MOBAs for a long time. Having clocked over 2 thousand hours in DOTA 2 and probably half that in League of Legends I feel I’m well qualified to judge any MOBA. For mobile, I was hooked on Vainglory until they started charging, no joke, 100 dollars for a hero pack that contained the hero and a few skins. Their publisher dropped them soon after and now the game is dead (although they won’t de-list it from the Play Store). Recently I got the itch to start playing again. My first choice was actually Arena of Valor but they require you to login with Facebook so…no thank you.
The Good
Gameplay
For MOBA gameplay, here’s the thing: all are essentially the same. You got heroes. They attack each other. You got items. You have 350 community item builds that assure you you’ll be a pro even when you face check every bush. You have towers, and lanes and pushing and last hitting etc. MLBB didn’t try to reinvent the wheel and I’m happy about that- playing it is like coming home – it is familiar enough that I immediately know what I’m doing. Heroes are adequately balanced for low to mid tier play (I win about half as many as I lose now). I see a lot of people whining about balance in the chat but so far everything has seemed fine.
Matchmaking
Matchmaking, which is something which will make or break your game, is blessedly quick. They’ve provided an option to expand the game search radius to include other countries if it takes over 30s. It works well and if I were going to grade this game solely on how fast you could boot the game and find yourself in a satisfying game, I’d give it a better score than I’m going to.
Lack of loot boxes
Heroes aren’t gacha based or loot box based. You can buy most/all of the heroes outright with in game currency of one form or another (more on that later). Granted that rate of hero acquisition is going to be slow as hell. I played 2 days and had enough for one hero but that was with a newbie bonus and curb stomping most games due to my prior experience in the genre (update: On day 3 I’m up to 10 heroes). Still, with enough patience it’s relatively easy to get a small stable of heroes that you enjoy playing with without spending any money at all. So. Y’know. There’s that.
Art/Graphics
The art style is nice but every. single. female. looks. the. same. Oh my god. There are probably 6 female heroes that are utterly indistinguishable from each other. “ICE QUEEN and FROST QUEEN with the LIGHTNING GODDESS and ARCHER ELF” it’s all ….yea.. I’m not sure if this is something where the longer I play it the more I’ll learn to recognize the tiny pixels as “oh yeah that sniper that kills me from eight miles off” or not.
Still… not bad. Here are the two heroes I’m playing predominantly. They don’t look the same as each other but they sure do look like other IPs.
The Bad
Confusing as Hell
I have no idea what’s going on in this game. I don’t mean the actual laning/jungling/team fight part, I’m fine with that. That part of the game works well. What I’m referring to are the five pop ups that I have to close prior to getting to the loading screen. You know, the one that looks like this:
In one screen there are buttons for:
- Profile
- medal chests
- Timed chests
- Daily Quests
- Advertisements
- Shop (has roughly 50 different options inside)
- Events
- Starlight (whatever that is)
- Live
- Esports (somehow not related to live)
- Chat
- A Montoon “announcement” bell
- Facebook share
- Ranked rewards
- Starlight shop…I think
- Preparation
- Heroes
- Leaderboards
- Achievements
- Contest
- Inventory
- DOTA Chess or whatever the hell they call it here
- Two people standing, one behind the other
- Add a Friend
- A round trash can (JK no idea what tf that is)
- Arrows to switch the game mode
- Friend List
- Battery icon
- Wifi Icon
- Settings Icon
- Mail icon
- Buy more currency icon
- Diamons icon
- Gold Icon
- M card Icon
- I’m pretty sure there’s actually more under the Esports too but I’m not booting it up to find out I plan to leave work at some point today.
Thirty Five (35) Freaking Options on the main page and every single one of those options opens up on a sprawling new tab-based menu that looks at least as complicated as this main page. And all of them vie for your attention with little red notification dots. “OPEN THIS CHEST!” “CLAIM YOUR REWARD!” “NEW LIVE STREAM”
Oh it’s maddening.
Monetization
Along with the confusion is the games’ uncountable amount of currency. There’s achievement points, M-tickets, starlight, Diamonds, Battlepoints, 3 different “season pass” currencies that are limited time, a plethora of “tickets” that you can purchase with one of the other currencies that let you enter a drawing for a skin or hero (keep in mind you CAN buy them, but yes there ARE loot boxes as well), several different chests that can be opened with various currencies, luck points, hero fragments that you can collect to buy heroes with, emblem pieces that you can upgrade baseline stats for any hero. You can buy heroes with M tickets or battle points or with diamonds. Some with 2 of the three. M tickets and battle points are earned through gameplay. Battle points are pretty standard, win games, get gold. Complete daily tasks get gold or M-tickets. Diamonds are the currency you buy with real money and hrmm…how bad could it be?
Let’s take a peaksy poo.
Well that doesn’t seem great. 6,000 diamonds for 100 damn dollars.
Well Whatever. I’ll pay 5 bucks and get 275 diamonds. That should let me get at least a hero.
Oh you sweet summer child.
I’d say on average a hero is 300-400, with some ranging up to ridiculous costs that I forgot. Oops. The ones shown above are 600 so for 100 dollars you can get ….10 …..heroes…..
holy shit batman.
With over 100 heroes, you’re looking at over 1,000 United States Federally Minted Dollars in order to purchase them outright.
I spent ten bucks or five bucks I forget to get a one time “SPECIAL PACK” that contained less than five dollars worth of diamonds but also ‘hero shards” which are little useless crap you pick up that you can eventually combine an inordinate amount of them to get a hero.
To be honest, it’s not too bad to get heroes without paying money but this sort of setup is absolutely insane. I didn’t even get into skins and how much THOSE cost.
Review Score
Pros
- Nice art
- Fun gameplay
- Ten minute matches
- DOTA chess for people who like that sort of thing
- Lots of skins and characters, you’re sure to find one you like.
- Matchmaking times are low
Cons
- Monetization is outrageous
- Currencies are too numerous and menus are overwhelming.
Back of the box quote
“…like a 90s Warez site where you just knew if you could somehow click through all the popups for boner pills you’d hit paydirt and get to play Half Life for free”
Verdict
If you’re into MOBAs, you could do worse. It’s possible to play, collect heroes at a reasonable rate, and even get a few skins without ever spending a dime. That said, if you do want to spend money, prepare to shell out a hefty fee in order to obtain anything you may want.
As a final note: League of Legends: Wild Rift will release sometime in the next month or two for North America. It’s probable that it will outclass this game in nearly every way (although knowing Riot, it’ll somehow cost more).
Get involved!
Comments