Rumors about Valve’s next venture, a multiplayer strategy game, have been floating around the internet for quite some time now. Formerly addressed as Citadel and Neon Prime, Deadlock is the final name of their new competitive game, and the beta coverage restrictions have been lifted yesterday, although people still need an invite from a friend to join the fun.
The simplest and perhaps most accurate way to give start to this preview is by describing Deadlock as “Dota 2 if it were a 6v6 third-person shooter”. And if you remember Dota Underlords, Valve’s standalone take on the Auto Chess genre, which was born as a community-made Dota 2 game mode, you know it was all about mobsters fighting to seize the city.
Deadlock keeps a bit of Underlord’s thematic, but this time players battle across 1940s paranormality-filled New Yorkian streets (woah, that’s a mouthful!) with a mission of weakening and destroying the enemy team’s Patron to complete “the ritual”. The little we know about the story so far comes from character descriptions, ingame voicelines and hints spread around the map. But if the plans are still the same as they were when content leaked some time ago, that’s eventually going to change with an ingame visual novel.
As it is to be expected, characters let out contextual voicelines when fighting against different opponent characters, sharing their fondness or hatred for what they are doing or whom they have just eliminated. Same goes for the Patrons, which act as announcers and react to what’s going on the match in real-time.
Although easy to learn, hero kits on Deadlock are much deeper than they may seem at first. There are many surprising character combos, not to mention near-endless variety to teamfights when you take builds/items into account. This is very important for a game with matches that may last up to 50 minutes, otherwise things would start to get repetitive very quickly.
To progress through the match, players must defend their lanes while making the most of every means to make their characters stronger and advance towards the enemy base by taking out towers. However, this is much more complex than the game lets out, for there are many different ways to do that and many tricks, each with their own risks and rewards.
In fact, the tutorial doesn’t mention half of them. In a way, that’s where Dota’s and Deadlock’s alluring complexity resides — there are many elements playing out at once, and sometimes it is knowing how to react and the best way to do it that makes all the difference. It’s up to you to adapt your strategies on the go.
But we’d be lying if we said that comes with no caveats. Those who have never played a lot of Dota 2 before are going to stumble with much steeper learning curves. People who have played friendlier MOBAs before, such as Smite and League of Legends, may even end up drawn away by the intense snowballing potential and by not knowing how to properly react to it.
For those who have, Deadlock proposes finding new approaches to old challenges. For instance, instead of using Warp Scrolls to flee or gank, players have to keep an eye out for rails, improve their dodge and jump momentum skills, and know their way around the map. There are no Tangos and Mangos either, so going out of health means you’ll have to go back to your base to recover. That is, if you can make it there before someone ambushes you in a dark alley or shoot you out from the skies.
The skill ceiling is super high and making sure to provide players with content to work towards improving their skills is going to be a recurring challenge if they want it to be welcoming and easy to get into. Of course, there’s nothing keeping you away from casually enjoying the game, but just like Dota 2, Deadlock shines much brighter when every player is going the extra mile to earn an advantage over their opponents.
That said, Deadlock is shaping up to be our favorite multiplayer competitive game released in the past years. The combat is exhilarating, the characters grow on you and it all both looks and sounds great, making good use of Source 2’s potential.
It takes a lot of effort to create such a game, especially one that entices experimentation and can easily be rebalanced — which is hopefully Deadlock’s case, given there’s a lot that can be tweaked. We’re looking forward to what else the Deadlock development team has in store for us, and we definitely recommend going after an invite to try it out if you’re into shooters with RPG elements and intricate strategy games!
