Prime Arena Demo

In order to avoid becoming an outcast as a developer, there are certain genres you should avoid if you lack experience or you are not entirely sure that your ideas are going to change things in a substantial manner. Thus, it’s best to avoid competing with titles like World of Warcraft and Dota 2, and at the moment it’s recommended to stay away from the survival FPS genre entirely, given all the salty fans out there.

Prime Arena is a fast-paced MOBA with survival elements, in which you play on your own instead of working together with a team to achieve victory. The game does not look like much when you first start playing, but then you notice that it is actually created by Nival, the same studio responsible for classics like Etherlords and the fifth episode in the iconic Heroes of Might and Magic series.

With all of these things in mind, it’s difficult to understand why Prime Arena feels so cheap and unpolished. Granted, the game is still in early access at the moment, but maybe this should have stayed in closed beta for a bit longer. In essence, the main gimmick rests with the fact that you can only die once the match begins, hence the survival aspect. Thus, sometimes it’s better to avoid conflict entirely if you want to last longer.

The map is a bit bigger than in your average MOBA, so there’s a lot of exploring to be done once the matches begin. The mobs actually pose a huge threat in the game, not just other human players, so you have to approach the encounters with care. Since the game is not exactly free, there are only a handful of heroes you can play with if you don’t buy the full experience, but thankfully they are on a rotation.

The top-down perspective isn’t bad, but the graphics feel like they would better suit a game from 2004 instead. This is not a huge problem and it can be ignored most of the time, but the fact that the map is very repetitive and unimpressive for the most part is a huge drawback. Hence, the narrow passages feel very claustrophobic and annoying, especially since there are very few unique landmarks around the map.

On a closing note, Prime Arena does not impress in any regard at the moment, even if the underlying idea might be intriguing. A MOBA where you do not have to depend on your teammates is pretty tantalizing, not to mention the survival elements, but then again all of these only work if the actual game is fun to play.