SMITE 2

I can't recommend this game to anyone, even if you are a fan of Smite 1, for clarity. I was a top 100 NA kuzenbo player with almost 7k hours and played with/against some of the top players at the time, including Paul, Weak3n, and Dinkleberg. Smite 2 does not follow the same rules and the balancing issue is somehow worse in Smite 2 despite Smite 1 having almost 3X the god pool to choose from. This game is VERY new player unfriendly. It felt like they just wanted an excuse to squeeze the fanbase for more money. So in earnest, I cannot recommend this to new players or old players. This game has all the balancing issues that Smite 1 had but, worse because either the items are heavily overtuned or flat out useless along with the god roles. Practically no one wants to play ADC, Supp, or Solo now because characters are so unbalanced that you can play just about anything as a flex pick in those roles. Remember when you'd see a mage once in a blue moon in solo like a zhong playing some off-tank build or a janus going for those juicy cross map snipes? Have fun ONLY fighting ranged mages in solo while you play a warrior and get out pressured and lose.

As a 1000+ hr Smite player, this is an insulting cash grab

Trash

Well I finally decided to really give Smite 2 a try and I can say without a doubt, it is garbage. I know this is in beta but even still, it just feels so much worse to play than the original. I don't understand the logic with letting all the gods use ALL the items from the item pool. You couldn't even balance the original game properly and your solution to that was letting warrior build Rod? Not to mention the fact that they are releasing Gods that have been out for YEARS and revealing them like it's something brand new. If you were planning on making essentially the same exact game, just with a fresh coat of paint, maybe have all the previous characters established and not have a rollout for them like they havent been around for the last 5 years and expect a pat on the back? All the hours and money spent on the original game pretty much pointless. It's not like you can't still play Smite 1, but it's never going to get updated again and the player count has dropped significantly. It didn't dawn on the developers that MAYBE people who have limited skins, frames, etc would want to keep their items and inventory. Because again, this is the SAME GAME. I've seen people say that its because they couldn't port over all the old stuff to the new engine and blah blah blah. If that was the case, maybe they shouldn't have made Smite 2 in the first place. Imagine if Riot Games said, "Hey guys! Buckle up because we're dropping League of Legends 2!!! oh and all your current cosmetics and paid for content won't be available anymore AND we're going to stop updating the game AND you have to repurchase all the characters all over again. ARE YOU EXCITED?!?!?" I just don't see why this was needed. It still has the same issues that the original game had, if not worse. And the visual overhaul was not enough to justify making this trash. Even the name of the game is stupid. 'Smite 2' was the best they could come up with I guess. A blatant money grab in my opinion.

Smite 2 has been better than 1 for a while now. Most negative reviews were about the skin transfer system between the games, which were nowhere near valid btw. If you're new reading this, just look up a few tutorials before jumping in conquest. In the meanwhile, try joust and arena when learning the basics. Yes, it's not as optimised as many would have liked it BUT aspects are a great addition to the game making many gods play completely different and the devs have a better understanding of balancing nowadays

Hi-rez is an awful publisher and titan forge isn't that far off. They should have figured out continuing smite 1 over this.

Now that I have a bit of time in Smite 2 I'll say that Smite 2 has good parts to it. For the most part things feel smoother in gameplay than Smite 1, even if Smite 1 was fine as it was. Theres small decisions theyve made that are improving the overall feeling of smite 2 such as bringing back the old gods people loved over introducing new gods into the game and learning from smite 1's development even if after making those same mistakes. Thats about where that ends and maybe most of the cons I'm about to describe will be solved in the future, but theres no way to tell. So lets start Itemization feels very boring, especially after smite 1 added passives to tier 2 items a few years ago. Not everything has to be the same of course but building is so much more complicated to start with than it ever was prior, without the things that made it interesting. The itemization in this game feels so bland because all the items build into each other and that sucks. Maybe it helps mitigate the fact that buying the wrong items isnt a problem but it makes actually going through the item shop feel so much worse. The in-game ui is miles behind anything that existed in smite 1, you can't go back on your own matches to see what you built to see what items you liked and what items you didn't. I'll excuse the amount of match options because of playerbase size, but it sucks that things like clash and siege are completely gone, including slash. Skins are absolutely ridiculous as well. While the daily log in rewards are very rewarding, why do i have to pay for skins I had in smite 1 again? The token being given from the battle pass also has very limited usage whatsoever, I think I found a total of 3 things you could purchase with it. Personally, I feel like balancing has been a bit questionable and the introduction of multi-scaling feels a bit contrived and often just feels better to lean one way or the other. That being said, the fact we didnt have anti-heal options for a while, they've reintroduced scaling to healing abilities, and mages are still the best characters on average is mind boggling. I do want this game to succeed, but I worry heavily for the future of this game.

Absolutely hundreds of hours into SMITE 1 and nothing to show for it in this release. Literally buggy mess too AND they are literally asking you to pump MONEY to get the same exact gods again and pushing so many battlepasses already in SMITE 2??? What a downfall for HiRez...

Smite 1 Developed by wizards, apparently, because this game could run on a toaster. The god and kit design was fun. The community was competitive, toxic, chaotic, but also genuinely entertaining. Season 1's Halloween event and the first Odyssey were peak Smite. After that, some seasons were good, some were bad. The mismanagement of Smite was ultimately its downfall. Focusing on other failed projects slowed down meaningful patches, which eventually turned into a constant cycle of Neith skins and endless character and item tuning. They punished free speech instead of dealing with trolls and intentional throwers. Matchmaking was awful. Then COVID hit, and the game experienced one last spike in popularity before people found out Smite 2 was on the way—and that none of your progress, God Pack, or skins would transfer over. That was the beginning of the end. Smite 2 Mechanically, Smite 2 is superior to Smite 1. It runs on Unreal Engine 5, so there's no more spaghetti code. Unfortunately, that same magic that let Smite run on a tomato is gone, which isn't great for gamers on a budget. The game feels like it's in hyper-salvage mode. All the other projects failed miserably, so now all the focus is on the successor—which is how it should have been from the beginning. The gods are being rushed out. Character design feels terrible, with very little quality or personality. The map is dull and boring. The skins that were advertised as being purchasable with "Legacy Gems" still require you to spend money, meaning some players have had to buy content all over again. So yes, they lied. The whales will keep spending, but the people who genuinely cared have already walked away from the franchise. To some, this is a competitive game. To others, it's a dress-up simulator. "But it's a beta." I'm not saying Smite 2 should be perfect, or that I expect every god to be available immediately while it's still in active development. What's frustrating is watching this transition unfold the way it has. Smite 2 should have stayed under wraps until the current roster was already ported over. It should have launched in the state it's trying to reach now, with new gods becoming the primary focus afterward. Having to wait years for gods that have already existed for years is actually insane. Instead, the focus feels like it's on cosmetics over UI improvements, quality design, and properly finishing the roster. Mismanaging the earnings from Smite to fund multiple failed titles was a terrible decision. On top of that, not investing in a proprietary engine—like some competitors have—means they're always dependent on someone else's technology whenever they want to make major upgrades. That's the Achilles' heel of this franchise.