Deadlock from Valve no longer a secret - store page is up and we can finally talk about it

Deadlock, perhaps the worst kept secret from Valve, has now been softly revealed as the latest game from the maker of Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal and Team Fortress 2.

Even before it was officially announced, it managed to pull in over 44,000 concurrent players during their secret (but not very) invite-only play-testing. We know this thanks to public data from SteamDB, which tracks everything on Steam, and Deadlock itself has been on there for quite some time before being announced.

Technically, Valve haven't really announced it yet. They made a store page, which is incredibly light on details, a Twitch category, and they have posted in their official Discord to note people can now talk publicly about it:

Since it's still invite-only, you'll have to find someone who has access.

Previously, the game would give you a warning when you first load in, asking you clearly not to share details publicly, which some (hi The Verge) decided to ignore. This has now been replaced with a simple reminder that it's in early development and feedback is welcome.

So what is it? Well, that’s a little complicated to answer. But, I did have access pretty early thanks to an invite so my best attempt at a simple explanation: it takes the lanes, towers and AI creeps gameplay from Dota 2 and turns it into a third-person hero shooter with rails in the air you can jump on to travel across the map quickly. It’s definitely peculiar and much like Dota 2, it’s easy enough to get into but really takes a good while to learn properly.

With its two 6 on 6 teams, each team fights across defined lanes in the map that have guardians at specific points you need to destroy. You push through each lane with the help of your teammates and your AI creeps. Gradually, you push the enemy team back by taking down different types of guardians to eventually make it into the enemy base. Inside the enemy base you take down their Patron, which is like a multi-stage boss battle, while also trying not to die from the enemy team madly firing off every single ability they have at you.

You’re not forced into any particular lane though, you can run or rail across the map and go wherever you like. It’s a team game after all, but leaving a lane empty is of course not a good idea. The rail system definitely adds a nice spin to it, letting you quickly zip across the map from your base. You can get a fast speed-boost from it too, but once used it goes into a cooldown. Additionally, the rails for you only work in your territory, so once you push past an enemy guardian, your team's active rail length will expand.

It has a pretty fun character movement system too where you can dash, double-jump, mantle over things and slide too. So it's reasonably fast paced, especially during combat between players when you're all jumping around trying to avoid all the abilities going off.

There’s quite a number of characters already, all with their own set of abilities, much like Dota 2 or any of the various hero shooters out there. So learning it can be quite overwhelming initially, as you not only need to learn your abilities, but how to deal with whatever characters the opposing team picks. Thankfully, a good few of the characters are super-simple to play as.

It's not just the characters though, you also need to keep upgrading as you go through a match and learn what works best for each character. And here's where it's once again like Dota 2. You have to earn a currency, souls, and then run along to a shop to buy up character upgrades. Thankfully, there's a suggested build system you can follow and anyone can make one and publish it for you to follow.

Valve seem to be learning a clear lesson from the failure of Artifact here, building it up gradually with a growing community and tweaking it constantly based on player feedback. The secrecy around it, along with the invite system, has attracted a lot of attention and even though it's been leaked constantly, this plays quite well for free advertising for Valve.

It will be interesting to see what happens with it when Valve open it up fully. Will it have the staying power of other popular Valve games? Will it end up eating away at the numbers of CS2, Dota 2, TF2 and others? Who knows. It's a weird one, but it can be a lot of fun.

Currently, there's no Native Linux version, but I can confirm it works really nicely on Desktop with Proton. I have yet to try it on Steam Deck but will soon.

You can follow it on the Steam page.