Total War: Arena (BETA)

When I first heard about a free to play, ‘MOBA style’ Total War spin-off I wasn’t really sure what to think. It wasn’t something that interested me a great deal and honestly, I kind of expected it to be a bit pants. But after watching some streams of Total War: Arena over the last few weeks, I decided to give it a try. And to my pleasant surprise, it’s actually pretty fun.

So how does it play? You have two teams, each comprised of 10 players, and each player controls 3 units of troops. The goal is to eradicate every enemy unit, or to capture the enemy base. You might think that a public/random 10v10 battle of that scale might translate into a poorly coordinated clusterf**k. And it does happen, on occasion. But in the 10 or so hours I’ve put into the game so far, it’s actually pretty rare.

This is because Arena is quite cleverly designed in terms of maps, player starting positions, and the unit limits. It’s a game which, even when playing with random strangers, is designed to encourage and reward cooperation and coordination. Team based support and strategy feels like a natural aspect of Arena. Players just tend to work together – primarily out of necessity.

 

If you’re fielding three units of archers, for example, you’ll want to stick close and support another player fielding infantry. You can screen their advance, whilst they protect you. With only three units to field, you can’t tackle everything alone or be everywhere at once. You rely on your team to engage, support, flank and defend.

Although the Beta only has a limited map selection, every map feels pretty balanced and neatly designed to support this natural team based play. They each have three main routes for players to advance – left flank, right flank and central. You’ll generally either advance along or defend one of these three passages with two or more of your team.

This tends to stop battles in Total War: Arena from becoming a Total Mess. Players are forced to spread out to cover every approach. Battles usually begin with small skirmishes as each team probes for a weakness in the enemy lines. Smaller battles then begin all across the map, players naturally supporting one another out of necessity. But individual engagements are only part of a larger whole – even if you’re not winning on the left flank, your team mates on the right may have broken through enemy lines, forcing the enemy you’re engaged with to retreat and reform.

 

And it’s pretty fun. I’ve had some really enjoyable battles in Arena. Without the need for any voice or text chat, players just naturally work together. To accompany this post, I’ve also released my first piece of video content. It’s a battle from Arena where you can not only see the game in action, but see how the game encourages and rewards good team play. You can view it here.

So what does Arena offer in terms of content? You can pick your troops from three cultural groups – Roman, Greek and Barbarian. These break down into different types of infantry, ranged, or cavalry units. Each cultural group has different Commanders to select. These provide unique abilities you can confer to your troops. For example, one Commander provides a bonus to ranged units, whilst another is more suited to cavalry.

Each Commander will ‘level up’ by increasing their abilities, and ranking them up also unlocks new tiers of troops. Your units can also be customised and improved by spending experience and ‘silver’ on new weapons and armour. There’s also an option for cosmetic customisation, although I haven’t unlocked anything in that category yet.

Given that Arena is a free to play title, I suppose the concern is going to be about its microtransactions and if they’ll make the game ‘pay to win’ when it eventually releases. Right now, I honestly can’t say. There are some units you can buy with ‘Gold’ which is the purchasable currency of Arena, but I don’t know if/how you can buy these units normally. It was possible to earn Gold by playing matches in an earlier build of the game, but that’s currently disabled for testing.

 

All I can say, is that I’ve been able to rank up three of the available Commanders to tier 4-5 and fully upgrade their troops without any real trouble or grind. You earn silver and unit/commander experience with every battle, all of which adds up and can be spent to increase your rank or upgrade equipment/abilities. I don’t know how/if this will change in the future. But in its present state, I can’t accuse Arena of being anywhere near ‘pay to win’.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by Total War: Arena. It clearly still needs work in terms of new maps and content, in addition to some balancing between certain units and abilities, but it seems to be getting fairly regular updates even in the short time I’ve been playing it. That said, I’m not quite sure what the long term appeal will be.

Although I’ve enjoyed my time with it, it’s not something I feel desperate to play or seriously addicted to. For me, Arena isn’t much more than a fun little diversion between playing other titles. But it’s something I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on.