You may have heard of Valorant, its currently taking the gaming world by storm.
It was released for closed beta in early April and is already the most popular game on the streaming platform twitch. It peaked at 1.7 million concurrent viewers on Tuesday 7th April, tying with Fortnite with the same record. Valorant also broke the record for ‘single day hours watched’ for a single game with over 34 million hours. Keep in mind this game is still in closed beta!
Valorant is produced by Riot Games, the producer of the famous League of Legends. For League of Legends’ 10 year anniversary, the game producer released a flurry of work in progress titles such as Legends of Runeterra:a strategical card game which you can already play, Project F: a MMO PPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Play Game) which is still in the worlds and of course Project A or as its now known: Valorant.
So, what actually is Valorant? Valorant is a strategical first person shooter. Unlike many shooter games such as Fortnite, Valorant is quite slow paced. There is no sprinting mechanism and shooting while moving makes your gun extremely inaccurate. The gameplay relies on thinking about your actions and making smart positioning moves instead of going head first into fights. The game is extremely similar to the game Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), with one team having to plant an explosive devise, called the ‘spike’ in Valorant, and the other team having to defuse it. Unlike CS:GO, in Valorant you can pick multiple different characters which have different abilities to help them.
Riot Game’s goal for Valorant was to make it extremely competitive and designed with esports in mind. This choice can be seen in many parts of the game. Visually, the game is very simple and not very realistic, however this means you can expect too see very high fps (frames per second) which means you will be able to react to things quicker. Additionally, the visuals of the game are very clean and have clear outlines, this makes it easy to see whether your bullet can be fired successfully or if something will block it. The abilities of different characters are also well thought out, they mostly revolve around vision and finding out the location of enemies or blocking enemies from seeing you. Many people were skeptical that the abilities would take away from the gunplay but when playing the game you will find that they actually enhance it.
From playing it myself, the game is extremely fun. It feels very responsive and the mechanics are well thought out. At first I was skeptical about playing a ‘strategical shooter’ due to its slow paced nature, but the tactics and strategy actually add a very interesting and fun gameplay element.
Valorant is in closed beta but is expected for release for everyone this summer.
