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The Top Three Greatest Hero Shooters Today

The dominant currents in the global esports community can be found in several clearly defined game genres.

MOBAs to Battle Royale

At the top of the pyramid, one finds the MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) genre, a 5v5 arena-based game mode that counts League of Legends and Dota 2 among its leading titles.

These games, descending from old-school Real Time Strategies (RTS) such as StarCraft and Warcraft III, trace their origins back to the internet cafes of early 00s South Korea. As such, they're home to some of the longest-running esports teams, players and organisations still active today.

Alongside MOBAs, Tactical First Person Shooters (FPS) are popular, particularly the latest iteration of the Counter-Strike series: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO).
Fighting games, or Beat' Em Ups, represent a third and exceptionally long-lived competitive subculture.

While the majority of the world's most popular esports titles today fall neatly into these categories, new game types have been in the ascendancy over the past decade. Among these, you'll find battle royale, which is more of a gaming mode than a fully-fledged genre.

Hero Shooters

You could be forgiven for not knowing what a Hero Shooter is, not least because the term encompasses a collection of games that appear distinctly different from each other. Over time the general definition of this genre has been established as new titles were released with the express purpose of building on and advancing its basic principles.

Essentially, a hero shooter is a type of FPS that incorporates, to varying degrees, character or "hero" abilities, such as those you find in modern MOBAs. In effect, the hero shooter attempts to combine the best aspects of tactical-FPS and MOBAs into an all-new, rigorously competitive and team-focused game format.

Overwatch 2

When Blizzard Entertainment's Overwatch first saw the light of day back in 2016, it caused a sensation and ushered in the modern hero shooter genre we know and love today. It brought with it a vast, diverse roster of hero characters, each with distinct abilities, strengths and weaknesses. It prioritised objective-based game modes and rewarded good communication, cohesion and teamwork.

Overwatch was also focused on accessibility, creating a game that a casual player could pick up and play without feeling frozen out by high skill ceilings.

Overwatch 2, less a full sequel than a major overhaul of the original, brings a range of crucial optimisations and modernisations. It adds new heroes, maps, game modes, and improved visuals.

It also aims to address some of the balance issues that had been levelled at Overwatch. As the original game was primarily focused on being an enjoyable and accessible title, it sometimes suffered as a competitive game, with skilled players struggling to differentiate themselves from the wider pool.

These updates, which are considered to be a response to the release of VALORANT, aim to balance character abilities further. Meanwhile, introducing new passive abilities for each class is intended to encourage player specialisation.

While Overwatch 2 is a new game, its PvP player pool has combined with the original's to prevent community fragmentation. To this end, Overwatch 2 also enables easy character migration from the first title, letting players move all their items and skins over to the new game.

VALORANT

While hero shooters such as Overwatch have enjoyed critical acclaim and healthy player counts throughout their run, no game belonging to this genre has reached a level footing with the so-called "S-tier" esports games of League of Legends, Dota 2 and CS:GO — until recently.

When Riot Games announced it was developing its own hero shooter, named VALORANT, this created a lot of excitement and expectation in the community. After all, Riot's leading franchise, League of Legends, is the biggest esport in the world, home to legendary players, mammoth prize pools and a globe-spanning competitive circuit. Suffice it to say, if anyone was going to maximise the competitive gaming potential of the hero shooter, it was going to be that company.

VALORANT was released in 2020, and it did so with inevitable fanfare, but it took a couple of years for player numbers to begin to grow markedly. By 2022 however, VALORANT was being referred to as the "CS:GO killer", citing the fact that its commitment to providing a robust and twitch-focused FPS experience made it the first tangible rival to the ageing Valve franchise since Rainbow Six: Siege.

Now, VALORANT is rightfully counted among the fastest-developing and most prominent esports in the world today. The growing VALORANT Champions Tour is proving an increasingly popular choice for bettors using offers on lines provided by OddsChecker and other leading industry comparison platforms.

What the future holds for the hero shooter par excellence remains to be seen. Still, with industry analytics platform Esports Charts ranking VALORANT as the most played PC esport thus far in 2023 by peak viewer count, toppling CS:GO to become the world's top FPS is beginning to look increasingly feasible.

Apex Legends

While Apex Legends may lack the refinement and clout of VALORANT, it is definitely worth your time, especially if you're a fan of battle royale games like Call of Duty: Warzone, PUBG and Fortnite. Apex Legends blends the hero shooter with the last-man-standing thrills of the battle royale format to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

In Apex Legends, hero characters are referred to as Legends, and have access to a wide array of abilities, from mobility buffs to accuracy power-ups. What makes Apex unique for a battle royale is its focus on high speed, dynamic movement and vertical environments.
Positioning in this title is critical, with players accessing a range of acrobatic parkour-derived moves such as slides, wall-rides and vaults. In this, it draws inspiration from the classic, high-octane arena shooters of the 90s, as featured in some of the earliest esports (Unreal Tournament and Quake).

Apex Legends has been out since 2019 but has been improving all the while and now represents a rich game with a wealth of customisation features and a large active player pool.