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Evercore Heroes applies League of Legends’ formula to a cooperative game

By Tomas Franzese October 11, 2022

Vela Games, an Irish game studio founded by former Riot Games developers in 2018, unveiled its first game at a digital prebrief event attended by Digital Trends. Titled Evercore Heroes, this game modifies themultiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) formula that League of Legends helped popularize into a competitive PvE dungeon-crawling experience.

While the basics of gameplay and isometric view of Evercore Heroes are very similar to a game like League of Legends, players aren’t directly fighting each other. Instead, four teams of four compete against each other in a cooperative dungeon-crawling experience where players slowly level up their characters, charge the titular Evercore, and eventually win by taking down a large boss. MOBAs, both in terms of gameplay and their community, can be intimidating to get into, so co-founderounder Travis George hopes that the cooperative aspects of Evercore Heroes and other efforts by Vela Games will make this an approachable and friendly game to which platers return.

“We all know that games aren’t always known as the friendliest places in the world — and we’re not going to change human behavior on the internet — but what we can do is be really deliberate about the gameplay, the community, and even the technology choices we make to hopefully orient players to have a more positive experience online,” George says. “Hopefully, that keeps them coming back.”

Four heroes travel to an objective in Evercore Heroes. — Image used with permission by copyright holder

So far, Vela Games has revealed eight playable heroes: Shade the assassin, the shield-wielding Fyn, Zari the archer, the creature with a community-voted design named Beko, the melee-focused boxer Blink, fire mage Cynder, tech medic Remy, and short-range healer Lotus. They each have distinct abilities, and most of them look like they could be League of Legends champions or Valorant agents, so Riot Games’ influence can really be felt in the design. Definitely keep an eye on this one if you’re a fan of Riot Games.

Evercore Heroes is currently in development for PC, and interested players can sign up for a player test that will run from October 13 until October 16.

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Tomas Franzese is a Staff Writer at Digital Trends, where he reports on and reviews the latest releases and exciting…

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John Carpenter is best known for his directorial talents, with films such as Halloween, The Thing, and They Live among his many classics. However, he is no stranger to the world of video games. He composed the score for Sentinal Returns in 1998, and was a story consultant on FEAR 3. He has now partnered up with Saber Interactive and Focus Entertainment to make a new title called Toxic Commando.

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When the video game industry looks back at May 2023, this month will most likely be remembered for just two things: the failure of Redfall and the launch of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Redfall will serve as a cautionary tale about the industry embracing its worst impulses, while Tears of the Kingdom will likely be considered one of the best games ever made and serve as a North Star for video game design for the next several years, like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild before it. Still, this month was about a lot more than that.
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To get the obvious out of the way: yeah, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is a really good game. We already considered Breath of the Wild to be one of the best games ever made, but Tears of the Kingdom's evolution of that game's open world and mechanics make Breath of the Wild feel like a beta. Not only do players have two new open worlds to explore with the Sky Islands and underground Depths, but systems like Fuse and Ultrahand ask players to embrace their creativity to solve puzzles and traverse around the open world.
"So long as you’re willing to meticulously survey Hyrule like an archaeologist digging for fossils, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is an engrossing sequel full of mysteries to solve and experiments to conduct," Giovanni Colantonio wrote in his four-and-a-half star review of the game. "It’s a digital laboratory that I imagine will still be producing unbelievable discoveries 10 years from now."
Details big and small impress across Tears of the Kingdom, and at times it feels like this is the closest we'll get to the ultimate video game experience. Its complex controls do take a bit of getting used to, but those who get the hang of it will be able to enjoy one of the most impressive games ever made. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is available now for Nintendo Switch, and this is the last time I'm going to mention it in this article. On to some other fantastic games!
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An evil Galadriel in Heroes of Middle-Earth

The Lord of the Rings franchise has a storied history in almost every entertainment medium, and we are entering a new era for its film and gaming efforts. As Amazon continues to produce The Rings of Power, Middle-Earth Enterprises has been acquired by Embracer Group. Instead of all of The Lord of Rings' games being made by Warner Bros., which had been the case for some time, we are now seeing lots of studios make games in the Lord of the Rings universe, providing their own spin on the idea. While The Lord of the Rings: Gollum is doing that on consoles this month, mobile game players are also getting a brand new game.
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What if?
When it comes to gameplay, my brief playtime with Heroes of Middle-Earth didn’t surprise me. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a mobile character-collecting RPG set in The Lord of the Rings universe. Still, the character-based approach allows Capital Games to play in The Lord of the Rings sandbox in ways few creatives have been able to. It has more freedom to craft more experimental scenarios with the franchise's iconic characters, as it’s not as concerned with falling in line with lore.

The premise is that players have discovered a new Ring of Power, which they must use to keep The Lord of the Rings timeline intact as a mysterious enemy is trying to throw it in disarray. That setup means that the game can create scenarios that don’t necessarily align with the Middle-Earth canon. Players can make characters from different time periods, races, and allegiances team up in a way that wouldn’t work anywhere else. They’ll encounter a Galadriel who was corrupted by the Ring and other characters who may have strayed from the path laid for them in the books and films. Post-launch, some of these alternate versions of characters will eventually become playable as well.
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“There are so many characters that you look at and see the small little decisions that happen and affect them, and it’s so fun to think about what happens if they made the other decision,” Ambrosini says. “They are fun things to explore and talk about, but the most important thing to us is that we’re telling a genuine Tolkien story and that we’re very faithful to the laws of the world that exist. Good deeds are rewarded with goodness; bad deeds are rewarded with bad things happening. We’re making sure that we’re appreciating and celebrating those pieces of Tolkien’s work.”