There isn’t a single in-game trailer or screenshot available for DOTA 2, Valve’s sequel to the Warcraft 3 mod Defense of the Ancients. Yet, remarkably, they are showing the game off publically for the first time by hosting a huge tournament for it. For the next few days, you can watch the action live, right here. There’s also a CGI trailer out, which I’ve embedded below.
I didn’t play the original Warcraft 3 mod, but it is widely heralded as one of the best of its kind. Mixing tower defense with real-time strategy elements, you control various ‘hero’ characters and their allies against other teams, while defending your own base. Valve have never made anything outside the FPS genre before, so I’m curious to see how this turns out.
I was watching the live feed earlier, and from first glance I can see it has plenty of character and style to it. Embarrassingly, there seems to be some lag, and the match was paused by the ‘referee’. Technical hiccups aside, this is a really interesting way of unveiling a new game. It’s clear that Valve are trying to get a slice of the RTS tournament pie, spear headed by the likes of Starcraft and League of Legends. DOTA has a huge fanbase, so there’s a good chance this will get a decent following when it’s released. The only remaining question is whether it’ll be free-to-play or not.
Here’s that CGI trailer:
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
The latest trailer for Dune Part Three just dropped. It looks rather splendid.
I don’t know many people who played Quantum Break, and nobody ever talks about it anymore, so it must have been rather forgettable for those who did. Even as I write this, two days after blasting my way to the end-credits of the 2016 bombastic time-travelling action romp, I am struggling to remember some of […]
Format: PC
Year: 2000
It may look clunky as hell thanks to the original Unreal engine, but Deus Ex was a pioneer in videogames because it gave the player so many choices to make. It resulted in one of the deepest gaming experiences of the time, because it went to great effort to show the consequences of those choices. The story was spread across many ‘hub’ levels, giving you total freedom to approach your objectives whichever way you wanted, aided by an RPG style upgrade tree that you invested in as you played. Wanna finish it without killing a single soul? That is entirely possible. Prefer to tool up with a rocket launcher and just murder your way to the end? Nothing could stop you. Your NPC allies would respond differently back in the Unatco base, depending on what you did out in the field. This level of responsiveness was unparalleled for a long time, to the point that even if you walked into the ladies toilets, your boss would scold you for it during the mission debrief later on. It was many little moments like that which made the game so memorable for me.
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