It is I, Emmanuel!
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft created by Blizzard Entertainment, the creators of World of Warcraft. Hearthstone is a card game, a collecting card game. The amazing thing about Hearthstone is it’s system requirements as you don’t need a £1000 gaming PC to run it, in fact, you can play it on a mobile device.
Gameplay:
Hearthstone is a card game where you play against 1 opponent. Both of you have decks with 30 cards in it, when you first play Hearthstone it puts you into the tutorial where it will explain the basics of the game. The aim of the game is to get your opponent’s hero’s health to 0. “What’s a hero?” A hero is basically a person you pick when creating you card deck, this is very important as some cards can only be used with a specific hero, there are 9 heroes overall, also each hero has a unique hero power for example the Hunter’s hero power is deal 2 damage to your opponent’s hero. There are 3 main card types minions, spells or weapon an
d 5 different card rarity’s which can be differentiated by the colour of the gem on the card. Usually you can have up to 2 of the same card unless that card’s rarity is Legendary. The higher the rarity the stronger the card would be, but it would also make it a lot harder to obtain. There are quite a few ways to obtain cards, crafting them with dust one of the many ways. You obtain dust from disenchanting cards which basically means destroying a card in return for dust, the stronger/rarer the card the more dust it would take to craft it and the more dust you get for disenchanting it. You can also obtain cards from card packs (Duh). When you open a card pack, you get 5 cards, and there will ALWAYS be a rare card in each card pack and if your lucky you might get some others! Gold is a the main currency used in Hearthstone, you mostly get gold from completing the daily quest you are set with. The daily quest vary from day to day, some quest give you 40 gold, some 60 gold, and others 100 gold. The more gold the quest the more time it would usually take to complete or it’s more difficult to complete. So packs in the shop cost 100 gold or you can win them in Arena! What on neptune is Arena? Arena is a gamemode where you choose a hero from the 3 it gives you, and draft the cards, you choose from 3 cards each time until you have 30 cards. Unlike a normal Hearthstone game, you can have as many of the same cards as you want IF you’re lucky enough to get the choice of re-picking it.
The point of Arena is to win as much as possible before you lose 3 games. Depending how much you many times you have won, you will then receive an award based of how many times you won. To enter the Arena you must pay a fee of 150 gold however if you win 7 games in Arena you have won enough gold to re-enter the Arena. No matter how many wins you have even if it’s 0, you will receive a card pack.
Aesthetics/Graphics:
Hearthstone’s Aesthetics are very simple bet yet very effective. It doesn’t have so much detail that it would overwhelm a new player and it doesn’t have too little detail that it would look very unpleasent to play. As said before the fact that this game has such simple graphics mean it has such little system-requirements meaning you can play this on pretty much any modern day PC as well as a mobile device like a phone or a tablet, etc.
The Competitive Scene:
Hearthstone’s competitive scene isn’t as BIG as League of Legends competitive scene but it is starting to grow. I would say this would be a great game to start mastering if you want to play a PC game competitively without relying on other people. Unless this isn’t your type of game of course. This game however is still streamed on Twitch and has a lot of viewers!
Verdict:
Hearthstone all together is a fantastic card game. Most of the lore comes from the game’s cards which have a link with Blizzard’s other famous game, World of Warcraft. In all honesty this game will continue to rise and get bigger through expansions and updates. However the Business Model, currently is pretty damn fair but if Blizzard messes it up then their player base could shrink. As of now, I rate this marvelous game 86/100.
– Emmanuel
Stuff and That. 