Note: due to the murky situation regarding coverage of this game, any images of Deadlock shown below are merely an artists’ representation.
It’s the game the masses shouldn’t be playing, yet tens of thousands of Steam users have gained access to Valve’s latest game, the much-anticipated Deadlock! One such user is none other than myself, and while Valve has asked people not to discuss their experiences, I am a journalist and therefore don’t count as people!
Also, like that guy from The Verge, I just hit the “escape” key when the start screen asked me to agree to keep quiet, which is something you can still do.
Now, let’s talk Deadlock as professionally, seriously, and definitely truthfully as possible!
First of all, you’ll be glad to hear this is a Valve game through and through. Deadlock is an unreleased game, which makes it a genuine product from the House That Gabe Built. It’s great news for those who were worried Valve may have forgotten how not to launch games after all these years focusing on Steam.
So, how promising is this thing? Well, as with any early online product, the experience is currently in flux. Checking through the Anonymous Source Engine patch notes, you get some valuable background information to help assess the current state of play.
Since it was sent to a few thousand hardcore Team Fortress 2 players back in May, Deadlock has been updated roughly every two weeks with the invited players providing feedback on balance changes. Using fans to essentially provide QA testing that the studio doesn’t have to pay for is one of the game’s biggest innovations.
Deadlock takes elements of the Hero Shooter and MOBA genres, though it doesn’t implement them in a particularly original manner. You can expect some standard team-based action where characters with unique abilities work together and aim to push back enemy lines. In truth, quite a lot about the overall concept feels rather dated.
Perhaps if it was released in 2016, it might have come across as more fresh. There is something unmistakably familiar about the whole affair. Can’t think of anything too similar off the top of my head though, but if there is one, I’d probably think it was robbed back in its day.
A Hero Shooter needs heroes, and Valve certainly provides a large selection. Each character has their own bespoke weapon and a number of skills governed by cooldowns. In a standard game, you’ll be backed up by respawning little robots who autonomously attack and assist in your frontline efforts.
Throughout play, skills and other traits can be upgraded by spending experience points. The so-called Helix Tree from which you enhance your hero allows for branching into a variety of builds, offering more flexibility per character. You won’t be short on content, at least as far as your collection of toys are concerned.
While map layouts are basic, you can build defenses to slow down opposing advances, giving the genre mashup a touch of Tower Defense. By far one of the most important things to invest in are turrets, though annoyingly I never see players spending the time building these crucial strategic structures. Come on, it’s not all about your kill count!
As noted earlier, there’s a large menagerie of weirdos to engage with, each one fulfilling a distinct role on the battlefield. There’s a precision-based archer, a katana-wielding melee specialist, and a heavy attacker that’s actually two characters working together. Neat!
One of the more interesting characters uses time manipulation to debuff opponents with abilities that inflict slowdown. Players will get a ton of use from the AoE skills this one rocks, and the fact he looks like a dapper steampunk robot is the icing on the cake.
By far my favorite hero of the bunch is Miko. Essentially an anthropomorphic mushroom, she tosses endless knives and works great in both an offensive or supporting role with access to skills that can heal allies as well as scatter enemies with status ailments.
Also, was anyone else surprised by the first-person perspective? I didn’t expect that.
Anyway, with Deadlock being designed for multiplayer, we have to talk about balance. Right now you can see a few heroes inordinately favored while others aren’t getting used at all. This is something Valve is hopefully addressing with those balance updates, though sadly they’re not getting the player feedback they hoped for.
The reason players have been asked not to discuss the game with anyone is actually quite a savvy one – Valve’s wanted data free from the bias that inherently comes with communal criticism.
In keeping opinions isolated, Valve would have been able to see what issues truly stand out to individual players. If a lot of people are publicly complaining about a certain character like Kid Ultra or Deande, it creates a background prejudice that many players are going to start looking for, creating potentially skewed sentiments.
Sadly, because of the way Valve kept lightening the restrictions on invites (which originally required an email and the manual typing of recipients’ names), we’ll never know if Rath is genuinely OP or not.
Visually, Deadlock boasts a very distinct art style, and by “very distinct” I mean “not at all distinct.”
The aesthetic leaves a lot to be desired unless your desire is yet more post-Fortnite inoffensively unremarkable cartoonishness. Apparently we can’t have a shooter like this without the knock-off Pixar visuals currently dominating the scene. It’s brightly colored, I’ll give it that, but it’s still nothing we haven’t seen before in droves.
Deadlock is in days so early it’s not even out yet, so much of my criticism could change in coming months. Maybe the game will go free-to-play after failing to reach an audience, overshadowed by Overwatch, before shutting down altogether, just like… oh…
Oh I’ve just realized I was talking about Battleborn this whole time! OH NO!
(Except the stuff about what happened with the invites, obviously).