I was skeptical at first, but Deadlock has ensnared me in a way that’s vanishingly rare. I’ve played Valve’s unreleased multiplayer shooter for 500 hours so far, and I’ve no intention of stopping. It’s my new Team Fortress 2. Heck, it might be my new Dota. It’s basically both at once, which is a feat of sublime dark magic, and phooey to anyone who looks in and claims this isn’t doing anything new.
OK, maybe it’s doing something like what Monday Night Combat tried to do 14 years ago – but not really, because it does so much more and so much better. It’s a MOBA that’s a joy to exist in; to move in, to shoot in and to think in.
It’s still in invite-only alpha, but those are easy to bag nowadays (either via the game’s Steam community page, its Discord, or other social media sites and forums), and a huge update earlier this week brought a sweeping map redesign and newcomer friendly changes to last-hitting, a core part of the game. Even the veterans are getting lost, so now’s a great time to join us.
First, a super brief, top level explainer for the uninitiated: Deadlock’s a third-person MOBA, which in this case means it’s about two teams of six advancing down lanes to blow up a big shouty magical robot thing in their rival’s base. Your hero gets stronger over the course of each match, hoovering up the souls of slain opponents or creeps – creeps being the li’l soldiers that march down each lane and valiantly give their lives for the greater struggle – and also so you can afford to buy magical pants that let you jump real high.
Shopping is another MOBA cornerstone, with the quipping street vendor you buy your pants from in Deadlock currently stocking 119 gizmos to build up your character, ideally in ways that’ll reflect what threats you’re facing in your current game. Getting gunned down by a hard hittin’, assassinatin’ Haze? Buy Metal Skin, and enjoy brief periods of bullet immunity. Being bombarded from above, behind, and who knows where else by a super nimble Pocket, lord of the skies and spirit damage? Buy Curse, and laugh as he hammers at his briefly useless ability buttons. Or don’t, actually, because I’m usually the one playing Pocket and that makes me sad.
Before the last update, Deadlock distinguished itself from every other MOBA on the planet by having four lanes rather than three. It turns out every MOBA on the planet has three lanes for a reason, and now, with its reworked map, the action in Deadlock feels more focused, with less time spent hoovering up souls (farming, in MOBA-speak) on isolated side lanes away from any kind of tussle.
Narrowing down to three lanes is far from the only improvement, too. The new map is twistier, more interconnected, and plays with verticality to a far greater degree. Anime-style rooftop chases have always been where I get my biggest Deadlock kicks, and now there are more of those than ever, with the new layout incentivising more players to buy movement items that let them bound about the scenery like ninjas decked out with guns and magic spells. While there are no doubt still major changes to come, it feels like we’ve seen the map take its last big step into what’s likely to resemble its final form.
Many of those rooftops are decked out with fans that propel you across the map, forming just one piece of the movement kit that’s a huge part of what makes Deadlock so captivating from moment to moment. Every character can roll, double jump, air dash and wall jump. You can also turn a roll into a super dash by jumping at the right moment, which can in turn be chained into a slide, granting you infinite ammo for as long as you keep skidding. If you buy a certain item, you can double jump, air dash and wall jump twice, and there are a bunch of other, even flashier techniques I don’t have enough room to mention. On top of those, there are the ziplines that run down each lane, with a speed boost that comes with a cooldown but lets you nip to the middle of the map in an instant.
Chaining all of your tricks together is fiddly and overwhelming at first, but that’s what makes it such a satisfying toolkit to master. Pulling off aerial stunts in the midst of a teamfight, or (even better) a cool rooftop getaway, lights up my brain in a way few other games have managed. That interplay between your abilities and the environment, desperately pinging yourself off a wall at just the right angle to pop up to another rooftop, folding in a short-range blink teleport from a Warp Stone, then a heavy melee to flit through a window and dash away to freedom… it’s sublime stuff.
I wrote a whole piece for Rock Paper Shotgun about how well fiddly parkour fits into a MOBA context, too, with tangible rewards for efficient traversal that go beyond just making you feel rad. The faster you move, the more you farm, and the more fun you have while doing so. Farming is the necessary, boring underpinning that makes the genre work: the difference with Deadlock is that rather than clicking your way between creeps, you soar.
Fair warning: if you’re new, there will be a painful adjustment period. Imagine a Rocket League lobby where everyone else can fly and you’re left doing donuts on the ground. But the new update should help you ease into your new Deadlock life a little easier. For a start, solo lanes are a thing of the past, and thus so are the unbalanced lane stomps that felt miserable when 1v1-ing a much better player (potentially on a hero who outright counters yours). Every lane is now a 2v2 scrap, so you always have a buddy to fall back on.
That last-hitting change should be a big boost during the laning phase, too. Previously, in order to extract all the juicy souls from a creep, you had to both land a killing blow on the creep itself and then shoot or punch the orb that flew out of it. You do get those souls if the orb pops on its own, but not if an enemy player shoots it first. Orb tussles are still in, but since the update you now get some souls automatically just for being near a creep when it dies. That caps how far behind you can fall against gun wizards who can somehow pluck every orb out from under you, while also freeing you up to focus more on dealing with the enemy directly.
It’s a controversial switch: last-hitting is a fundamental part of the game, and many players prize their ability to stay on top of picking minions off while simultaneously harassing their opponents. The shift does simplify the cut and thrust of the laning stage, but it also sharpens it, rewarding agile battling between you and your opponents more than the broader awareness and positioning previously required to secure all the souls in your lane. That’s still important, though, and for my money, the new system provides the best of both worlds.
There are endless nuances I haven’t mentioned, but I hope I’ve shown you something of how rich a tapestry Deadlock weaves, marrying the satisfaction of a movement shooter to the strategic depth of a MOBA. Like all the giants of the genre, becoming a better player means grokking a dozen different elements at once, figuring out where to be and when, then executing tricksy plays in the midst of a teamfight. There’s always more to learn, always another skill to strive for. If you get a taste for it, that depth can be intoxicating.
It’s also gorgeous, with some under-the-hood tinkering now rendering the streets of alternate-world fantasy goth New York in shinier and smoother fashion than ever before. The optimisation changes make moving and shooting feel intangibly better, through means I do not understand. Maybe something to do with a higher tick rate? I do not care, I just know that now Deadlock goes brrr. Up until this point, even small updates have borked the framerate on my aging PC, with it being something of a crapshoot as to whether I found the game playable. Now I’m on a delightfully consistent 100fps – so if you’ve previously bounced off thanks to performance issues, it’s worth coming back to check if they’ve been zapped. There’s DLSS support now too, if you need it, though surprisingly I’ve found I don’t.
I’ve mostly spoken to what a joy it is to play, but there’s also some appropriately Valve-tier world-building going on in the background. The whole game oozes personality, from the billboards advertising questionable magical remedies and beverages to the sheer slapstick of seeing a Viscous use his ultimate to turn into a massive goo ball and clobber through a team, like a sticky Indiana Jones boulder.
When I loaded into my first game on the new map, I got one of those rare, beautiful video game moments where you and a bunch of strangers all get excited about the same nonsense together. It’s currently Deadlock Christmas, but there’ll be more Christmases to come: playing in an alpha might mean occasional bugs and unfinished animations, but you also get the thrill of having large parts of the game’s foundations shift beneath you. This latest update feels like a huge leap towards Deadlock’s full release, but there’s still plenty of time to go, as Valve makes a great game even greater.
Over on the official Discord, you’ll find people handing out invites like candy. Take one. Join us.
