For the past week or so, I’ve had the chance to play Riot Game’s new project called Valorant. It’s a pretty popular new game at the moment, but for now, it’s still in closed beta. My friends and I have been playing the game quite a bit, and this week I’ll be writing about my experience so far with the game.
Riot Game’s is most popularly known for being the developers of the game League of Legends which is a competitive 5v5 MOBA game. MOBAs are Multiplayer Online Battle Areas where each player chooses a character with their own unique abilities. In order to win, one team must destroy the other team’s objective. Personally, I don’t really play too many MOBA games, but that’s the main idea. However, the point is that Riot Game’s specialty was League of Legends, so people were surprised when they heard that Riot was coming out with a First Person Shooter game in the form of Valorant.
Unlike most First Person Shooters, there are different characters that players can choose at the start of each game similar to Overwatch. These characters have different abilities and tools. The objective of the game is very similar to Counter-Strike where one team defends multiple sites while the other team has attack a site and plant a bomb. A lot of the gameplay features in Valorant are identical to Counter-Strike with the exception of specialized characters.
To be honest, when the closed beta was introduced I wasn’t really too interested, but once my friends started to get into the game I decided to try it out. I’d seen a few videos of the game on YouTube before I started playing, so I already had a general idea of how the game worked. To my surprise, I found that my experience with Counter-Strike transferred over really well. The only thing that I still find a bit confusing is how to best use each of the different characters’ abilities. For now, I’m only using one character and trying to use their abilities the best I can before trying to use all of the rest.
After a few games, it gets really fun to play especially if you have friends who are also learning the game with you. When my friends and I started playing, we were all already familiar with standard first person shooters, so it was fun finding out about what each of the characters could do and the abilities they had.
The game is still in closed beta though, so there are still some things that I think they could change. One of the things I don’t really like is how far away you can hear enemy footsteps. When a player runs they can be heard from really far away, and it makes rotating from one site to another take a lot of time if you don’t want to be heard. In terms of the character abilities, I think most of them are pretty balanced although there could be some small changes made to specific abilities.
Overall, Valorant has been a really fun experience and it’s different from the games I’m used to playing. I think in the near future my friends and I will be playing more of it. I’m pretty sure there are also some professional Counter-Strike players that have switched over to Valorant already. It should be interesting to see how strategies and gameplay develops competitively.