Bloodline Champions

As it stands, the chief achievement of the combat is how much room it offers for awesome displays of talent in a genre which is traditionally supervised by cold statistics. But in Bloodline Champions, let's say you're a weedy Igniter (a ranged damage Bloodline) caught by an ability that catapults you away from your team and into the middle of enemy ranks. You're basically doomed, but there's always a chance to narrow your eyes at death, grit your teeth, and use all your powers at just the right moments to come limping out of the situation alive.

Thinking fast, you might double back into the path of the melee guy chasing you and use your knockback power to shunt him away, immediately followed by a shot of Crippling Fire to slow him down and then your short-range teleport to put even more distance between you two. Then, as you're making good your escape, you could start flinging projectile attacks at the healer to get him healing instead of spamming attacks at you, and then cast your area of effect Volcano power right where you're standing so it goes off just as the melee guy is sprinting across it.

Or maybe your thinking fast will only extend to a panicked curse and pressing the F key (which doesn't even do anything) before you're torn apart in seconds. The game is just great theatre. You might only have one life, but when you do fall, watching the rest of the match play out is a thrill, and according to Tau that was always a goal.

"To suit e-sport we also believe a game should be fun to watch... We've worked a lot with the camera angle and team-coloured spell effects. As an observer it's important to understand the game and to be able to see everything that goes on. When watching a football game or any other sport on TV, you always see the game from above, you always know where to look and it's easy to follow."

It's worth noting that everything Bloodline Champions is doing is the polar opposite of last year's excellent League of Legends, which took Defense of the Ancients' core and added such a wealth of persistent elements that the game became something closer to an MMO. Between matches players gained levels, acquired runes, worked their way along skill trees, spent real-life money on unlocking new champions and generally did their best to make life distinctly rough for newbies.

In Bloodline Champions, you do have a level and a rank, but all they affect is how pleased other players are to see you when you arrive in the lobby of their game. A low rank can and will cause a sense of being the fat kid in a P.E. lesson that nobody wants on their team, albeit a fat kid with the potential to surprise everyone with shrewd use of magical powers and a subsequent killing spree.

"In the beginning of the project a lot of ideas were discussed and tried," says Tau, "but after the concept of the game had gotten quite clear to us we had decided we didn't want any persistent character development in the game. This is to make sure every match is played on equal terms... in the game, a beginner has the same chance to win as players who've played a lot."

Madness, clearly. But if Bloodline Champions and this "equal terms" concept does sound like your kind of thing, you might be in for a long wait. Despite its evident polish, 16 existing Bloodlines and range of maps, the game still has no announced release date, and the latest beta, the game's third, only puts the build at v0.8.6.5. Interested folk can apply for the next beta on the game's site, but really interested folk might be best off waiting for the full (probably download) release with all its inevitable spit and polish. When this game does come out, it should be absolutely gleaming.