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Hearthstone’s Duels mode is like a bleak knife fight with an omnipotent clownWacky Fun!
Wacky Fun!
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Terror seizes you, but in the same instant, your hand closes on rough iron in the bag’s polythene belly. An ancient revolver, heavy and rust-caked, with a single round taped to the barrel. Your fingers tremble as you fumble the slug into the chamber. Your mind goes blank, so that when the shot rings out across the waste, it feels as if it comes from far away. You do not look at the man’s face, as he bleeds out onto the dirt.
You blink, and the body has gone. So has the revolver in your hand. A new bag is set out on the ground, and a new opponent stands across from you. This one is different, though. He is a small, round man in garish clothes, with a big floppy top hat and a ludicrous felt cravat. But while his face is plastered with a merry smirk, his eyes are the frigid, glassy beads of a predator’s. You reach down for the bag - but as you do, your arm breaks a hair-thin strand of silk.Tripwire, you realise, just before the blood springs from the crossbow bolt buried deep in your thigh. With a comedy slide-whistle noise, the bag slides back from your shaking hand, and you’re forced to stagger, bleeding, in pursuit of it. The buffoon - who has also slid backwards, without moving at all - just watches and grins.
As anger begins to smoulder and smoke beneath the pain, you pounce on the bag. But all you withdraw from within is a handful of ants and rusty nails. “Wooooah! RANDOM!” shouts the buffoon, right into your ear. He has an obnoxiously loud, toy-advertisement voice, like a sex offender doing a bad impression of Barney the Dinosaur. You hate him, viscerally. Indeed, before you can even wonder how the hell he got so close so quickly, rage has launched your hands from the useless bag so that they can strangle him.
Your palms burn, the skin feeling suddenly tight.Ah. Superglue,you note. But it’s fine. Annihilation is a small price for denying this bastard another moment of joy in your suffering. You wouldn’t throw the bomb away, even if you could. “Wacky fun!” bellows your tormentor, and you are blasted apart in a cloud of ragged meat-scraps.
This is exactly how it feels to play Duels, the new game mode forHearthstone. And I really rather like it.
You start each “run” with a unique new hero power and a single, high-powered new card unique to your class, to which you’re free to add 15 further cards from an abridged version of the game’s full library. And once you’ve completed a duel, you get to choose between three “buckets” of three additional cards, intended to complement your existing deck. Every couple of matches, you’re also offered a preposterous “treasure” card, of the kind you’ll be familiar with if you’ve played much of Hearthstone’s single player content. Lose three times, and the run’s over.
Duels, then, feels almost entirely a game of chance. If you’re offered rubbish treasures, or they’re buried deeper in your deck than they are in your opponents', or if your “bucket” options aren’t actually that well synergised with the deck you’ve built, you’re just stuffed. You’ll be obliterated with such ease that your survival will last only as long as your opponent enjoys playing with your food.
Additionally, duels is in early access still, and won’t launch in its full initial form until November 17th, which means of course that the balance is completely and utterly mangled. There are nine heroes on offer (of which you get a choice of four at the start of each run), and several are unplayably weak. Unless I’ve been seriously unlucky, for example, piloting the Rogue class feels like wheeling a patient on a life support machine into a ring with six enraged boxers. If you’re unlucky enough to be matched against someone playing Paladin, which is currently nearly unstoppable, this becomes a dozen boxers, each of whom is nine feet tall.
One thing about Duels does really annoy me, however, which is that to play this broken early access version of it, you have to pre-purchase the £35 card bundle for the upcomingTrouble At The Naughty Circusexpansion. Sure, it’s not a bad deal just in terms of the cards you get, and the basic version of Duels will be free to play on release. But even so, paying to provide QA data always feels a bit of a slap in the face.
I don’t usually get all pompous about value for money and greed, et cetera, but this stings. When the entire game mode boils down to which desperate wretch can find the lethal weapon in their carrier bag first, it seems a bit crass to let people slip in a few extra handguns for a blunt cash payment. Maybe it’ll work differently in practice, but it looks a lot like Pay To Win to me. And while it’s fun to be the dickhead clown in Duels, it’s not something I’d pay for the privilege of.
