Deadlock

I feel like highly competitive PVP games don't get that much love on this website, compared to calm story driven games. Most of it probably comes because of bad matchmaking that gives no safe space for new players to learn without being obliterated by experienced ones.

For me, the fast and almost unlimited movement and air mobility in this game reminded me of Titanfall 2 parkour. Punches on meelee focused heroes feel like blood punch in Doom Eternal and pack serious damage. And the overpowered combo synergies of skills and active items really make you feel strong, like in Dishonored.

Of course it still has the disadvantage of online team games: you depend on how good your teammates are at cooperation and monitoring the minimap.

I actually find this game less stressfull than Dota, Lol, Hots, Smite.

Played it for 24 hours so far, and my only concern is keeping my work-gaming-life balance, because it's just too additive. When I quit the game, I keep thinking of new strategies and builds to try.

It's a good mix of genres with a whole lot of great gameplay design and QoL decisions, compared to other moba/shooter games that I tried.

This is weird. I don't like it at all. This ain't it.

No laning phase at all, no working balance between heroes at all, some of the heroes have the longest duration by default on slows/stuns while higher tiered heroes have no duration unless you're actively buying powerups.

Minions don't really matter because you get rushed by the enemies since there's no other payoff than rushing turret. There's no scaling 'early game' buff on turrets so you have no real incentive in trading blows or even minions farming past trying to snipe the health buffing minions.

In 6 games I did against real people, only one team thought about getting the equivalent of dragon, while camps that should be for further minions farming is are untouched by default and will stay untouched for the whole game. It's literally boiled down to whoever rushed whatever turret is left unprotected and that's pretty much it.

Lobbies are made basically only on beginner heroes and they are the most over-tuned ones around there, so much so that if you win a certain amount of games and get paired with the overlords above that do nothing but play this game in high expectancy of its release, you'll only see:

• Fire guy
• Policeman (sometimes)
• Haze
• Arctic dude

What they did was essentially create a shooter with some MOBA elements while not balancing them at all.

• No laning phase means that heroes who rely on getting certain items to make sure to do early damage (such as jelly dude) don't get that item unless they mow down whoever is in front of them because you don't have time to lane, you go immediately to shooting your enemy and rush turret...

• That is because turrets do not hold plating or any manners of making taking early turrets harder for an essentially item-less character, prompting people to rush the tower and the following guardian ASAP to bank that sweet soul collection.

I wish they would do away with the MOBA elements and commit to creating a shooter 6v6 team game that can rival Overwatch rather than trying to get into spicing up DOTA2 or League of Legends, one of which they already fully own and maintain as one of the highest playing MOBAs out there.

In poor words, I found myself wanting to engage with Valorant or Overwatch rather than whatever is happening with Deadlock.

Date of review: Sep 2024

This game is a shooter, so skill disparity is obvious even without gold advantage. By making a game where skill disparity leads to gold, the game is effectively over before it begins.

Further, at the moment, pretty much every death recap is 90% gun damage. Which means that abilities have little meaning.

There is also the issue that characters move around fast, so lanes are pretty much meaningless. It feels like playing ADHD the game.

Gun range is so long that farming is really stressful. In league and dota you stand behind the minions and play the careful dance of not over extending and engaging with intelligence, in this game you are always engaged so that really does not matter.

Core of the game is great but they need to get the game into a balanced state.

I'd expect the balance to come after a few years once a stable meta and play pattern is observed. But that might mean the game dies. Hopefully we get a new genre from this game as shooters have been stale post Overwatch .