Paladins Review: Strategic Team-Based Shooter

Paladins: Fire & Ice is a free-to-play team-based shooter with strategy elements. Download Paladins for Xbox and choose your own playstyle as you strive for victory in brutal 5x5 online battles.

Graphics — 4/5

Paladins, like almost every other popular shooter, consider its graphics one of the most important features of the game. And that is quite logical because for competitive games which make you fight a lot of consequent matches on the same few maps the quality of those maps becomes vital. Well, the maps here are detailed, and each of them has a unique design that matches particular game mode.

The champions are also quite detailed, and each of them has his own set of animations, and that’s what makes every hero prominent and memorable. But sometimes there are minor visual bugs, like problems with menus, although with each patch and add-on the developers try to get rid of the most annoying, and almost none of them affect the gameplay directly.

Gameplay — 5/5

Paladins is a hero shooter, and that fact must already tell you a lot about its gameplay. But it has some unique features which are enough to change our image of the genre altogether. Probably the most impressive of them all is the game’s great customizability. Apart from being able to choose from 36 different heroes with distinct abilities, you are free to pick one out of four talents that improve or completely alter some of those abilities.

There is also this card system that allows you to pick cards to raise your champion’s stats for the match, and of course, you can buy useful items right in the middle of any battle. All that practically makes Paladins look like a strategic game, at least half of the time. None of the similar games have this kind of customizability to offer, and that’s why Paladins really stands out in the genre. And don’t forget that it is free-to-play.

Controls — 5/5

Controls of the Xbox version are smooth in a way that makes your hero feel like an extension of your hands, which is very important for any shooter. And they are quite intuitive, so even a new player can learn to play the game fairly quickly.

Replay Value — 5/5

Paladins, like most of the hero shooters, has very high replay value. The number of available maps and heroes is limited, but their combinations seem to be infinite. You can change heroes, cards, talents, and items, playing in every imaginable way, and after all, it’s an online game, so there is also this competitive aspect. All in all, prepare to be spending hundreds of hours in this game.

The Bottom Line

Overall, it’s just a very good game that will probably set a new standard for a whole genre. So you can read this Paladins review – or you can just start to play the game and see all of its amazing features for yourself.