It’s never easy to be overshadowed. Growing up, I was an enormous fan ofPS1 racing royalty Crash Team Racing, and was thrilled to see it return in 2019 as Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled. For many gamers, though, Mario Kart has an iron grip on the kart racer genre.
Over the years, the same has been applied to the hero shooter genre andOverwatch. Tracer, Widowmaker, Roadhog my beloved, and the rest of the crew reigned supreme. By contrast, Evil Mojo’sPaladins: Champions of the Realm never really got the same kind of broad attention.
Paladins launched in 2016, not long after Overwatch. The former has become known forembracing the free-to-play model, which Blizzard’s effort shied away from until the arrival of the sequel.
This model, of course, can lead to all kinds of parasitic shenanigans from developers and publishers. It is very effective, however, at luring in curious players who just want to try an experience out without the risk of making a full purchase.
That was just what I did when Paladins arrived on Nintendo Switch in mid-2018.
My understanding at the time was that the game was super derivative of Overwatch, but I was bored, I was looking around for something new, and my expectations were thoroughly in check (particularly because the Switch was hardly the ideal platform for playing this sort of game in the first place).
I was shocked to find that I adored the game from my first few matches.
Being such an Overwatch-alike, you don’t need to have played Paladins to have a darn good idea of what it’s all about. Game modes encompass death matches and more objective-based affairs, with some sillier time-limited event modes thrown in.
Teams consist of five players each, picked from a wide roster of Champions split between roles: Damage are the standard dps-dealers, Support are the healers and buffers, Front Line are the tanks and Flank is reserved for Champions who can flit around the battlefield and disrupt key members of the opposing team (prioritizing targets is a key tactic as it is in Overwatch 2).
For me, the most important thing about hero shooters is that they have a wide, varied, and fun roster of characters. This is where I thought Paladins would let itself down, with Champions that seemed interchangeable in some cases from Overwatch’s Heroes.
Yes, Drogoz is just a draconic Pharah, jetpack, rocket launcher and all. Still, I went for it, picked an odd little goblin in a mech suit (Ruckus) for my first match, and I was away.
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Causing A Ruckus, And Loving It
I stuck with the little guy for my first few sessions, frenziedly firing miniguns and rockets, timing my ultimate terribly, advancing too far and getting myself blasted to smithereens … you know, the things that happen to new players in these games.
The fact was, though, I was in my element. The Front Line Champion role was absolutely my wheelhouse, and defending/pushing the objective in modes like Siege was some of the most fun I’d had in games in years.
There were mixed experiences, of course. My team destroyed in some matches and was destroyed in others. There were countless times that things came all the way to the wire, and the winner was decided in the last second or so.
This is what the thrill of a hero shooter is all about. So many discovered that in Overwatch, but for me, it was Paladins. I went on to enjoy both around this time, but it was the loadout and talent system of Paladins that I found so interesting.
Each Champion has a deck of cards, and a loadout is built from choosing five of them and assigning levels to increase specific buffs. They can range from simple things, like a higher ammo count or more health, to effects that really change the way you play.
Items can also be purchased at opportune moments during matches, to boost your character in different areas depending on how the match is going.
The Talent system furthers this, with three different options to pick from that typically bolster one aspect of that Champion’s kit. There’s a lot to mess around with and tweak, and it was largely this that saw my Paladins playtime skyrocket.
In 2023, support for the Switch port officially ended. There’s no denying that performance problems, crashes and such were a persistent problem, but this was some of the best and most sub-optimal fun I had on the system.
There aren’t many who would tell you that Paladins is better than Overwatch and its sequel, and they probably wouldn’t get away with doing so either. Thoughit’s not entirely forgotten like some hero shooters, Paladins is a really underrated workhorse at this point, for me.
What I will say is that, despite the arrival ofthe likes of Marvel Rivals, this is my favorite entry in the genre. It’s been my comfort game through good times and bad, and none were worse than the time I tried to finally learn to snipe effectively with Strix and remained absolutely diabolical at it.
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