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By marrying a MOBA to a movement shooter, Valve is making me swoon for DEADLOCK

- Matt Cox

Some games are immersive; Deadlock is enveloping. Every second of Valve's third-person movement shooter MOBA demands your attention, whether you're landing shots in a hectic team fight, or considering shop purchases while beating up neutral monsters and simultaneously monitoring your mini-map. It's the lovechild of TF2 and DOTA, and deserves to be bigger than both.

Deadlock is for a certain kind of person: the kind that likes having dozens of tactical and strategic considerations thrust into their lap at once, where even the quieter moments thrum with deliberation and your brain never stops fizzing. I've played over 1,500 hours since Valve launched its quasi-closed alpha last year, and I'm here to tell you why you should join me.

Let's start with the vibes. You're scrapping over an alternate version of 1930s New York, or The Cursed Apple, as dubbed by an incidental olde-worldy radio on the map that spews lore tidbits. Ghosts are real, many of the 'heroes' have been messed up by magic or science or a combination thereof, and everyone's fighting to summon an eldritch god that can grant wishes. Billboards advertise reanimation specialists or haunted meats, and between games you hang out in a gothic lair that resembles a castle inside a skyscraper. It's an impeccable collision between the occult and New Weird (think China Miéville telling a horror story), and testament to Valve's commitment to building an engaging world even though most of the time you'll be too busy to appreciate it. It's a broadminded approach that Valve has been honing since TF2 and DOTA and later on we'll dive into those throughlines and developers. For now, I'm going to try to explain how MOBAs work in a few paragraphs.