DOTA 2

There’s an adage that the Dota 2 community often quotes when someone identifies themselves as a new player. “Welcome to Dota 2!” They say, with open arms, before concluding with, “You suck.” They're not wrong: for the first dozen hours or so, you'll be bombarded with too much information and an often unforgiving community of extremely competitive players. But if you persevere, Dota 2 becomes one of the most rewarding and tense team-based multiplayer experiences anywhere in gaming. It's an achievement owed to uncompromising depth, a ridiculously generous free-to-play model, and the great features developer Valve has built up around it.

Valve's artists deserve praise for a crisp and readable style that, after some practice, makes it possible to tell what's going on even in a massive brawl where both teams of five colorful fantasy characters collide and cast spells at once. However, credit for the intimidatingly complex design of Dota 2 belongs to the original Defense of the Ancients mod (known as DOTA) for Warcraft III, which kicked off the MOBA genre. Valve (after hiring on DOTA's key developers) has copied that formula almost to the letter, and as a result Dota 2 has become notorious even among its MOBA peers for its difficulty – and that’s totally justified. It’s a double-edged sword that leads to both a terrifying introduction and a world-class competitive game at the highest levels.

As such, you should not expect to have fun your first day playing... or even your first week. That sounds like a cardinal sin of gaming, but there’s method to this madness. In short, Dota 2 is a deeply layered construct of systems, and to survive you need to understand every single one and how they interact with one another. Everything from learning to work as a member of a coordinated team to the counter-intuitive practice of killing your own AI units to deny the enemy experience points and gold they’d get from doing it themselves, and understanding  the effects  of hundreds of complex abilities like Bloodseeker’s Rupture (which deals huge damage with every step you take) is a big barrier to entry. Even figuring out which of the 102 heroes (and counting) fits you best is a time-consuming challenge.

Initially, you’re thrown into the deep end to flounder, trying out any hero that makes the slightest bit of sense. The selection is bewildering: playing as Riki with his permanent invisibility from level 6 on is an obvious choice, as it's hard to kill what you can't see. Drow Ranger, perhaps, with her obscene damage the instant she unlocks her "ultimate" ability at level 6, and her slowing Ice Arrows that enable both escapes and setting up a kill. On the more complex end of the spectrum you have choices like the armour-manipulating Templar Assassin, or the incredibly mobile Storm Spirit, who can dart around the battlefield and avoid damage by simply not being in the wrong place at the wrong time. On top of that there are well over 100 items to choose from within each game, each with their own ways of manipulating and enhancing your stats and suite of active abilities.

Your learning has just begun when you've settled on what roles, heroes, and builds suit you best – you also have to adapt based on what other players choose. If the other team plays a Riki, you need to compensate with an emphasis on detection. Go up against Bloodseeker and his hideously powerful Rupture will force you to carry around a Town Portal Scroll to get home in a hurry. 

Review by ~ Phill Cameron  8.5 out of 10