Dropzone First Impression at PAX West
Dropzone has completely flown under my radar. Barely aware of its existence before now, I’m really glad I decided to stop by the game’s PAX exhibit. Pitched to me as a modern RTS developed by RTS veterans, I was a bit hesitant at first. The RTS genre has always been a bit daunting to me; I wasn’t sure how deep of an understanding I could get from this type of game in 15 minutes. It turns out, I picked it up surprisingly quick.
Dropzone strips away the base building and much of the daunting micromanaging aspects of an RTS and replaces them with the more streamlined features of modern MOBAS. In Dropzone, you control three heroes that you draft at the beginning of a 15 minute round. Players simultaneously pick each hero, opening up drafting strategies. These heroes can be mixed and matched from three classes: tank, recon, and mechanic. I ended up with one of each in the demo but was assured that I could take three tanks if I wanted to.
The round starts and players have decisions to make. The main objective is to have more points than your opponent by the end of the round. There are several ways to achieve this, the most basic of which is to farm PvE minions and turn in these orbs to the center. All the while, you must manage your three heroes and strategically plan your attack on the objectives and your opponent. If one of your units is eliminated, they respawn after a cooldown period. If you manage to take out enough minions, bosses, or opposing heroes you can upgrade one of your units. Choosing how to upgrade requires a whole amount of strategy on its own; I chose to only level my tank to rush getting his ultimate, a strategy which paid off when I nuked the developer I was playing against at the last second to secure the win.
The variety and short timed matches in Dropzone are what I found the most appealing and are the reasons I will likely play this game as soon as I get home. I haven’t seen a game that is centered around head to head matches with only a handful of hero units. The closest thing it resembles is playing The Lost Vikings in Heroes of the Storm, except Dropzone has upgradeable skills and loadouts that will surely keep players busy for awhile.
Dropzone is currently in closed beta and will be a free to play game. Sign up now on their website.
