If you don't like losing, you might want to sit this one out...

As gamers, we all have those games near our hearts that we just want to see succeed, against all odds. Sometimes, this desire for success stems from the incredible potential we can see within the game itself and how much that potential could be realized if only the game could catch on (we're looking at you, Sword of the New World). Other times we want a game to succeed because the industry, as a whole, could benefit so much if it just had some role models leading the way. For us, however, Stunlock Studios' Bloodline Champions (BLC) is one of those very rare games that actually falls into both of the aforementioned categories.

 For those of you who don't know, Bloodline Champions began as a fairly unknown game, but has since been chosen by many players as being the next big competitive game to come in a long time. BLC originally rose to a fair bit of notoriety from a few competitive Defense of the Ancients (DotA) players who claimed that BLC was basically a combination of DotA with World of Warcraft Arena, but based purely on skill. Of course, we just had to check it out at that time and, since then, we can honestly say that BLC really does have the potential to be one of the most competitive games of all time.

Bloodline Champions really does feel and play like DotA mashed up with WoW Arena. Players can vie against each other in team-based fights of up to 5v5, although the "competitive standard," seems to be the same as World of Warcraft Arena: 3v3. Players on both teams begin by choosing their hero (called "Bloodlines") and, after the choosing stage is over, they simply duke it out against an opposing team, much like World of Warcraft Arena. Combat also vaguely resembles DotA, in the sense that you look at your character from a top-down point of view. Where BLC differs from DotA (and pretty much all other games on the market) is its actual combat. Every skill for every hero in BLC is actually direction-based, rather than targeting based (even the heals). In this way, players control their movements via the classic MMO controls of WASD, and they aim and fight using a combination of their mouse and hotkeys.

In addition to all combat being direction based, Bloodline Champions also boasts that it features zero "random number generation." For those who aren't up on their competitive gaming lingo, random number generation, also known as RNG, is used to label almost every ability in any game that has a "chance" to occur. Critical strikes in League of Legends, for example, or mace stuns in World of Warcraft, or even things like damage ranges, where a spell will deal anywhere from 100-125 damage: all of these things do not exist in BLC. Instead, BLC relies purely upon precise numbers, so an Execute shot from a Gunner will deal 44 damage; no higher, no lower.