Core gameplay loop is very fun, and the controls (using a wired Xbox One controller) are tight. Absolutely worth the asking price today just for the current iteration of the roguelike campaign.

To be clear, it absolutely earns the Early Access tag- there are bugs, there are performance issues, and there are mystery mechanics. So if you are not prepared to deal with all of that, then now is not the time to hop in- give it time and come back later.

If you are willing to brave all that though, Distant Kingdoms is an engaging experience. Once you understand how Warehouses and Marketplaces work, the economic and logistical systems yield a lot to play with. Teching-up, expanding, and integrating new outposts all yield enjoyable, complex challenges. The art style and overall themeing keep the world engaging to play in.

I am looking forward to the developer's continued improvements and additions to the game. The one feature I know is not on the roadmap that I would really like the developers to consider and which would greatly improve the appeal of this game is cooperative multiplayer.

I've been dabbling with it for about a year now in its early access state. At first, I was extremely disappointed with the team having dropped the Commander Mode component that I was really looking forward to. The same mode that was also supposed to differentiate SoaDA from other MOBAs.

I have dipped one toe after another into its glistening waters, slowly immersing myself into it, constantly wondering if I'm making the "right" decision, because SoaDA has no shortage of competition and many of its competitors have larger communities with instant queue times.

I have waited to post this review until I could definitively state whether SoaDA truly is worth forsaking so many other options... and I find the verdict to be that it is.

What wisdom do I have to offer those dangling on the same decision? And to those who want to know if SoaDA is $5 well-spent?

The best wisdom I can offer on the matter is that SoaDA is "different". While it pushes a plethora of features that other MOBAs do not, none will jump off the page at you to differentiate it from other options. The "difference" comes from playing it, getting a feel for it, and immersing yourself in its world.

It starts with its cast of heroes. I was originally disappointed here because, coming from Demigod, heroes with four active abilities and one passive compared to heroes with a wide array of abilities accessed via an actual skill tree is a little bit of a letdown. But while SoaDA will never compete with Demigod when it comes to having the most customizable and versatile heroes, it offers the next-best thing, and the way that works out, that's just fine.

SoaDA's heroes are well-designed. They're limited in number compared to its peers, but SoaDA makes up for this by distinctly nailing the "feel" of each hero. They're all excellent in their own ways, but a few in particular absolutely exemplify this. Rachna, a spider queen, plays the role of a support tank, and she achieves her tankiness organically through her spiders' mere presence while she casts abilities leveraging only the resources of cooldown and spider consumption. Drengar, a melee berserker, activates abilities off cooldown and passively builds rage by chaining ability use against foes to initiate berserk mode- between this and his actual abilities, he exactly replicates the feeling of commanding an actual berserker, making little to no compromise to achieve that. Ziri could be yet another ranged carry, but she uses stamina which has a fixed amount and a fixed (high) regen rate to use her abilities, turning her into an acrobatic assassin rather than one that can only piece together a smooth move every once in awhile. And there are plenty of other examples, but these stick out immediately.

Beyond the heroes, SoaDA's quest system feels like the natural evolution of the themed maps in Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm (even though to the public eye I believe SoaDA's quests predate HotS's maps). Whereas the themed maps in HotS are hugely impactful yet repetitive and all-too-short, SoaDA's quests are built for the long game, and fighting to win each proves more epic and the long game of which team can rack up the most quest wins does an excellent job of being impactful yet subtle (compared to HotS where it often is match-deciding). The sheer ability of these quests to force teams to completely dismantle their typical strategies and scramble to work towards a quest while still managing lane attack and defense creates a frantic yet structured atmosphere that manages to work well even without closely-coordinated teams.

SoaDA also does an excellent job of ticking quality checkboxes. The game is responsive, the UI is effective, the options are gushing, the controls are customizable... Even in early access, the game already sports excessive refinement in these areas that allow it to compare well to titans of the genre and industry.

SoaDA also offers some things that other MOBAs barely, if at all, do. On paper, its progression-based mechanics to acquire and allocate skill points, hero gear, and other items obtained from playing the game reeks of an attempt to hook into online FPSes' craze with these kinds of things, but SoaDA does it responsibly. The tweaks are slight- but notable- and allow skill to dominate (for example, leveling-up to be able to use more skill points doesn't actually mean you get more skill points in a match, it just means you get to choose where more of those skill points go- everyone otherwise gets generically handicapped to compete with the highest skillpoint player). The customization is welcome though. I mentioned before how Demigod extracted a lot of versatility out of a low number of heroes, and this is how SoaDA achieves the same. The newest hero gear is actually hero-specific and can modify things like how a hero's ability works, which is really neat to see.

Thus far, I'd rate SoaDA's approach to all of this to be most inline with Team Fortress 2, but whereas I feel like TF2 has spiraled into a mess whereby if you lost track of the game for even a tiny bit you have no idea what you're facing, SoaDA is introducing all of this at a more tractable pace and the variation, while significant for the user, is slight enough for the opponent that you can get away with being behind the curve on the latest gear to hit the street.

And what about those abilities? One of the reasons that gear to alter their behavior is so awesome is that the abilities are tightly integrated to the hero and game world. Whereas HotS allows plenty of customization of abilities, most tweaks tend to adjust numbers or improve one part of the ability. SoaDA abilities to begin with tend to be far more active than HotS and other MOBA abilities. For example, nearly all abilities require skillshots or area/directional targeting. This is where the hero gear really comes into play because it directly modifies how it feels to make that skillshot or perform the targeting and immediately modifies how you approach combat.

In all, SoaDA is an excellent MOBA game and I recommend it most highly to players who are fatigued with the genre's current banner bearers. It offers something familiar yet strikingly different and refreshing.