Dota you want me, baby?
Deadlockgives me the shakes.
Valve’snot-so-secretthird-person MOBA shooter is a fiercely competitive game of push and pull through monster-peppered city streets.
It is tactical, deep, instinctive, and an interesting work-in-progress.
It elicits adrenaline almost as much as it forces murder economics down your piehole.
I need to get as far away from it as possible.
I won’t get swept away.
Kill them to earn yet more souls and handy spell slots, then push on toward the enemy base.
The enemy, meanwhile, is trying to do the same thing in the opposite direction.
There’s lots more to it, obviously.
This incarnation has fun ziplines to get you back into the action quickly after a death.
you’re free to doublejump and dash and slide around.
Its strength lies in complexity, and in the pressure and adrenaline of exciting team fights.
To someone who prefers focus and fears percentages, this can make it challenging to get into.
Deadlock is a game for violent and quick-witted hummingbirds, and I’m a dumb pigeon.
The complexity is mostly the result of a shop where you upgrade your character as the battle rages.
This offers an overwhelming selection of buffing bits and bolstering bobs.
No item simply does one thing.
I’m picking the easiest examples, because I have to double-check you keep reading.
But there are many items much more intricate in their stat-altering.
But this is a MOBA, after all.
The point is to allow for many potential combinations of hero “build”.
Even those versed in the genre might make it difficult to decipher the facts of the battlefield, though.
Who is hitting who, and with what?
It sounds like a chore, yet is also meant to be this way.
Deadlock does follow both approaches.
It’s a hero-filled MOBA after all - the abilities of each bulletbastard is what makes the game work.
Those abilities need to be distinct and interesting, though.
And I’ve struggled to find characters that really interest me.
The high level fun will come in how good teams bandy their abilities together.
Every death, every misjudged charge into a fateful fray will bring questions.
Did death come swift because that samurai has a bunch of items stacking DPS?
Or because he did some ability I missed?
How has the enemy team farmedthat many soulsalready?
I can’t deny the fierceness of Deadlock’s hectic play.
This is the feeling all murderously competitive games seek to bring forth.
But that prophecy is not set in stone.
Strip it back to the fundamentals, and it remains Dota 2 in third person.
From a business perspective (ugh) Valve are essentially competing against their own most popular game.
But what game isn’t?
It’s intoxicating goo.
I’m desperately washing it off.
