Unlike
Dota 2, Dota Underlords is a straightforward game. You can easily think
of it like a deck builder or drafting game with multiple
economies--Dominion, Ascension, or the Legendary series are some good
touchstones. Facing off against seven other people, you have to build a
team from a selection of heroes presented to you, and that team will
then fight in head-to-head battles with others over a series of rounds
until only one player remains.
The
game uses the heroes from Dota 2, and it automatically resolves the
battles over the course of a 30-second period, with the heroes using a
hand-picked selection of skills to wallop one another as fast as they
can. Once a round has begun, you don't have any influence on it, so all
you can do is watch, wait, and pray that your team strategy will work
for you.
Because Dota Underlords is a mostly automated
game, it is able to evolve the exciting intricacies of deck
building--synergies, strengths and weaknesses, etc.--in ways that
tabletop games can't. And as a result, Underlords is able to layer
system-upon-system as it increases its complexity and skill ceiling
through a combination of resource and random number generator (RNG)
management.
The fact that most of Underlords is
automated doesn't mean there's a lack of depth, though. Before
long--it's surprisingly easy to pick up--you'll be able to contemplate
not just your own random selection of heroes, but the hero pools of
seven other players in the game as you try to craft the perfect team.
You may opt out of picking up that Disruptor because you know three
other teams are trying to pick him up already, and that lowers the
percentage chance of you being able to get the three you need to upgrade
him. With a little more experience you might pick him up just to lower
the percentage for your opponents.
As anyone who plays
board games, poker, or even battle royales will tell you, the
opportunity to turn bad fortune into victory is the ultimate thrill.
Randomness can lead to both good and bad situations, but most of the
randomness in Dota Underlords is good because the game gives you plenty
of viable avenues to change your fate through smart play.
If
you know you need just one more Bloodseeker to upgrade him to an early
three-star, for example, your best strategy is to spend a bit of time
rerolling your hero selection at early levels (usually an inefficient
plan since gold is precious at the start of the game) to find him. Your
odds of finding Bloodseeker drop dramatically once you pass level five,
so you can manage those odds by delaying levelling yourself up--and an
early three-star Bloodseeker with a Stonehall Pike or Cloak is a very,
very dangerous thing.
One area where the RNG management
gets a lot tougher is in opponent selection as you move through a
match's rounds. You have no impact on it all, and not all opponents are
created equal. Some are better players, while some just have better
starts. Some are deliberately losing early rounds to put together a
quick loss streak, trading their health for free rerolls and extra money
to get a leg-up later down the line. And if you're a player just doing
the best with what you've been offered, you will face off against one of
them at random. If it's the person who rolled into a round-one two-star
Nyx Assassin with a side of Weaver, you might as well start trying for
that losing streak now. If it happens to be the player who didn't field
any heroes, you just got a free win.
True randomness
means that in each round Underlords rolls an eight-sided die and
determines who you will face, and that means you could conceivably run
into Nyx and Weaver three times in five rounds. This is frustrating, and
repeatedly facing off against the player in the top position is not
something you can manage around. It would be foolish to try to shift
your strategy into beating a single player while you still need to worry
about six others still in the game, and it is demoralising when it
happens again during the same match.
Everything already
mentioned is primarily detailing "Standard," but Dota Underlords
actually comes with three other modes that can mix up how you think
about the game. The first is Duos, which is Standard only with a
partner. You can trade heroes and gold back and forth between one
another, so the dynamics of the economy are different and the power
spikes can happen a lot earlier.
Knockout,
on the other hand, is a fast-paced variant of Dota Underlords designed
to create a more palatable experience--which suits the mobile version of
the game quite well. When Dota Underlords first launched in early
access, Standard matches could last up to 50 minutes (which is very
characteristic of Dota, but bad for mobile phone batteries), though the
average sits at roughly 25 minutes now. But Knockout games are designed
to last about 15 minutes tops, and because of the way they're
structured, you get to see a lot more high-powered three-star units.
While I commonly secure wins in Standard with just one or two
three-stars heroes, I've played Knockout games where every character on
the board had been upgraded to the max, and it's very exciting.
With
a reduced cost to level up heroes and a simplified health system,
Knockout games play out hard and fast. Economy management is
non-existent, as everyone races to spend all of their money each round,
and victory or defeat is always a single lucky roll away. It feels like a
perversion of the form, and it won't help you hone your strategies for
the Standard game, but it's entertaining nonetheless.
The
other addition, which was released alongside Dota Underlords' v1.0
update, is the City Crawl, a narrative-focused mode which tells the
story of White Spire. With the death of one Momma Eeb, the criminal
element in White Spire has found itself searching for a new ruler. Now,
each of the city's four Underlords--Anessix, Jull, Hobgen and Enno--is
attempting to secure their place as top dog.
City
Crawl tasks you with charting their pathways to the top by getting you
to participate in a series of Underlords-based Puzzles, Knockout-style
Street Brawls, and Challenges. The puzzles vary between comically simple
and genuinely challenging, and the Street Brawls are well constructed,
but the Challenges, which ask you to win with certain conditions, don't
seem to have as much thought in them.
Tasked with
winning 40 rounds with Enno and Insects saw me specifically forcing
insects into teams where they didn't fit, for example, and as an
experienced Auto-Battler, I could recognise this as inefficient play
that I employed only to achieve my Challenge goal. But new players, keen
to start with the game's campaign, can form bad habits as a result of
it. It also feels as if some challenges are designed solely to get
players to spend their "Keys to the City"--items obtained via the Battle
Pass, the only monetisation element in Underlords. Being tasked to deal
30,000 damage with Savage units, for example, isn't a difficult task,
but it's incredibly tedious.
But by-and-large, the City
Crawl incentivises playstyles that you might not otherwise
enjoy--completing puzzles almost feel like reading chess books in
between games. And as a result, City Crawl does a great job of reminding
you why Dota Underlords is such a compelling and challenging
experience. A lot of games these days require a high degree of manual
dexterity from the player, but apart from brief moments spent
frantically clicking the reroll button to find the solitary Medusa that
will no doubt give you victory, Dota Underlords largely exercises your
brain, not your mouse hand.
If
Underlords faces any challenges, it's thanks to its games-as-a-service
model. The decision to rotate heroes in and out of the game allows Valve
to maintain a semblance of balance, but there will always be people
unhappy that their favourite hero has changed or disappeared. As season
1's changes to Axe proved though, the rotation system provides the game
an opportunity to take a character considered largely useless and turn
them into an exciting and dominant force on the chessboard. Things can
and will change in the future, but Underlords' launch gives the
impression that there is strong thought driving the game forward behind
the scenes.
Dota Underlords is a diverse and constantly
captivating experience where no match plays out the same way twice.
Having been with the genre since it was a custom map mod, it's
heartening to see it executed as well as it has been here. Outwitting
your opponents and the odds through clever thinking is always immensely
satisfying, and the game's complexity means that there are plenty of
interesting strategies to try. Dota Underlords is a wonderfully robust
and well-crafted strategy game that is very easy to lose yourself in.
