Paladins is having a nostalgia wave, for a shooter its own studio left for dead
Returning players are filing Very Positive reviews that read less like recommendations and more like eulogies, for a hero shooter many of them still rate above Overwatch.
Paladins is a free-to-play hero shooter whose trick was a deckbuilding twist: cards let you rebuild each champion's abilities into your own loadout. This week it's drawing a wave of returning players. No patch, sale or announcement explains it, and the reviews themselves are the event.
Those reviews keep hitting the same bittersweet note. The crowd that came back to praise it is the same crowd mourning that its studio walked away and left the game frozen in time.
What is this game?
Paladins is a free-to-play, team-based hero shooter that launched in 2018 from Hi-Rez's Evil Mojo studio. Its signature was a card system: instead of locking each champion into fixed abilities, you drafted cards to reshape how a character played, beefing up a basic attack or rebuilding an ability into something its designers never quite intended. For a stretch it was the most-customizable hero shooter on the market.
A spike no patch explains
Here's the honest part: there's no obvious trigger. No new update, no headline sale, no esports moment shows up to explain why players are flooding back this week. What the reviews make clear is the shape of the return: it's nostalgic, not new. People aren't discovering Paladins; they're revisiting it, and writing it the kind of send-off you give something you've lost.
The eulogy in the reviews
The most-upvoted recent review comes from a player with more than a thousand hours logged, and it's four words long:
I think I miss Paladins.
Others spell out the grief and where they lay the blame. One veteran framed the loss as a studio decision, not a design failure:
My favorite hero shooter ever. Everything in this game was just plainly funner than what Overwatch offered at the time. Unfortunately this is a Hi-Rez published game and thus it was left dead in the water.
Verdict: still worth a free download, eyes open
If you never tried it, Paladins is free and its loadout depth still beats most of its rivals; there's a genuinely good shooter here to spend a weekend with. Just go in knowing what the returning crowd already does: nobody is coming to update it, so treat it as a great game preserved in amber, not a live one. ✅
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