I haven’t played it in a while but I get so much second hand salt from overwatch that it’s giving me heart disease. Id like to be able to say sorry I couldn’t hear you over the sound of me playing literally any other game but dang, blizzard has been aggressively crushing it’s consumer goodwill into liquid gold for a while now. It’s like they saw a marrie condo video and had the epiphany that all that love they get from their player base no longer brings me joy.

Then they pop a Squat on your favourite franchises and lay down a hot steaming cash shop on their chest.

I think we take our queue on what to do with a game from the developers of the game. Which I guess is why everyone is throwing Overwatch in the bin.

But there are a couple developers out there that you can tell are so into their game that you can’t help but love it and hope it does well. For all the grindathon dead ends in Warframe I can’t help but drop money into it. Digital Extremes puts so much into it and I feel like I’ve gotten so much value that they NEED at least 20 dollars when they give me a 75% off coupon.

And you know what, for what it’s worth, I Think Microsoft have been pretty good stewards of Minecraft. And Stardew guy. He kept adding to that game way longer than he had any responsibility to. He’d already got all our money. Go finish chocolatair dude so we can pay you again!

Ok enough foreplay, now a new studio can be added to the board.

But there are a couple developers out there that you can tell are so into their game that you can’t help but love it and hope it does well

Omega strikers by Odyssey Interactive is one of those games. it’s a 3v3 competitive hero based soccer game that finely balances attacking players, and playing the ball.

Omega strikersis a game I can tell the devs love so much that im just desperate to see it do well. I want to be the embodiment of Karma, TAKE MY KARMA MONEY. It’s a crypto coin I got scammed into buying by a Buddhist and it ain’t worth shit anymore.

This game had the same effect on me as Warframe, where I didn’t NEED to spend any money on it, but I felt like I’d extracted so much value out of it that the devs deserved to not starve to death.

At the beginning of the match players are either designated the goalie or one of the two forwards. Goalies receive buffs to encourage the mongaloid players to stay where they belong, and the forwards, if they’re working well together will have a midfielder and a full forward harassing the goal keeper and looking for an opening.

Characters have a stagger bar, getting pummeled too much or bashed against the side of the map will take you out of the game temporarily, giving your opponents a crazy advantage. Nothing is more tense than playing defense killing time all by yourself while your two teammates slowly res back to life.

It has a variety of maps, each with it’s own little gimmick which mixes up the gameplay just enough to keep things interesting. Each map has a unique bumper next to each goal which must be hit first before the goal gates open.

Standard and competitive play is a best of five rounds. Each round is punctuated with the chance to pick up a new hero perk from a pool. MVPs go first with shit kickers picking last. You can use this time to deny your opponent valuable perk picks, or make up for your hero weaknesses or personal playstyle. a game takes about 20 minutes, more both teams bring their A games.

Just as an aside, every hero has their own theme, and the current MVP will have their song playing across the match. Very nice touch!

Quick play is a simple first to five with a random assortment of equips dished out at the beginning of the game. Matches will go for about 5 or so minutes I reckon.

It has the moba hook of making you slowly hyper aware of your positioning and technical skills wanting you to get better even if you, like me, aren’t typically a competitive player. But it doesn’t have the moba downside of spending long enough with your teammates to get curious about their home address and mum’s maiden name.

The game has no in-game chat. It’s too fast for text chat, and I honestly don’t want to be in a voice channel with a bunch of Randos. If I want a full stack it’s not hard to make two friends and chill on discord. It does use big emotes you can earn and has a bunch of preset commands to do all the communicating you’ll need though. The emotes are perhaps the first time in a long time I’ve actually cared about earning pngs. The equivalent sprays in other games are used as stocking stuffers, getting a spray feels more like a punishment. But since the emote pics in this give you so much personality in the way you troll or communicate that I actually want to earn a nice curated hoard. Your usually getting them from e vents, Battlepass freebies, or leveling up your hero affinity (which I think is purely a cosmetic leveling system to grind out each hero.)

Monetisation is done via skins and a battle pass with a huge amount of time to complete. Skins You don’t have the full roster fully unlocked, but the base team is purposefully cheap and buyable with the currency you get just for playing through the game. Brand new characters are substantially more expensive, but being able to just play to get them feels fair to me, although I do cringe saying this to you and being like “but it’s actually fine I swear don’t run away.”

The game is available on literally everything. I played on mobile on the bus the other day and I was, to put it lightly, a negative asset to my team. Don’t play on dodgy connections unless you want to min max people hating you.

I’ve been playing since the beta and the devs have not been shy about making changes. It flowed quite different before launch. So I’m sort of open to everything I’m telling you being completely out of date in a year from now as they fiddle with it.

These guys go HARD on their micropatches. They’ve done fully produced videos explaining even their most minor balance changes. It’s like they care about us or something. That’s a weird feeling! Not even I care about myself.

I guess the difference between a big dev and a little one is that these guys are hungry for this game to succeed, while the liquifide bones of your average Activision dev doesn’t care one way or the other.