Recent reviews by amygdala

Welcome to Dota 2, the Hotel California of online gaming. Late Last March, I was naive enough to dip a toe in its beguiling waters and today, 450 hours of gameplay later, I return as a semi-functional human to regale you with tales from its realm.

Dota 2 is unlike any other game I’ve ever played, both in its nature and history. It started off as a StarCraft mod popular enough to be ported to Warcraft 3, which then exploded into a kaleidoscope of player-made variants and eventually coalesced again into a single entity titled Defense of the Ancients Allstars. There is no single author of Dota, though all the anonymous contributors who’ve made it what it is have come from the community that first started playing the mods. As such, Dota is the very definition of grassroots game development. The idea of a game made by the people for the people, as a certain American president might put it, fills me with a particularly warm and fuzzy sensation.


Of course, I knew none of this when I first picked up Dota. A friend recommended it because it’s free and I’m cheap. I understood that the game had a team-based format where killing the other guys was a good thing, like with first-person shooters, but your character also leveled up through the course of a match, as in role-playing games. That seemed like a recipe for unbalanced gameplay, but as it turns out, it’s precisely Dota’s balance that makes it so unbelievably addictive.

You start off as a member of a ragtag group of five heroes intent on destroying the enemy’s base, which is embodied by the titular Ancient structure. Through a series of skirmishes against the other team, their defensive towers, and waves of autonomous creeps, you gain experience and gold, the latter of which can be spent on items that make you stronger, swifter, and deadlier. The more you kill, the more you make, the more you buy, the more you kill. Rinse, repeat, and make sure to say "gg" at the end.

LEARNING A LANGUAGE MIGHT BE QUICKER THAN MASTERING THE FULL BREADTH OF DOTA
Excuse me if I’m making this sound simple, because it really isn’t. Dota 2 has a roster of over 100 heroes to choose from, and the combinations of items they can obtain is an order of magnitude greater still. Each hero has four or more unique abilities, and to have any hope of defeating a skilled opponent, you have to know what those are, what items he or she is carrying, and how they affect your chances of survival. Ignoring all of that nuance, I jumped straight into the game with the Juggernaut and was promptly beaten into a pulp of samurai sushi. A dozen humbling ass whoopings later, I was online and reading the Dota Fire hero guides.

DOTA 2 CHOICES
The key reassurance I can offer is that all of these intricacies are, in fact, worth learning. As daunting as Dota’s complexity may be, without it the game just wouldn’t be as rewarding. My way of rising to the high bar of basic skill required was to pick the last enemy hero to destroy me. Thus I went from playing Juggernaut to Bounty Hunter to Bloodseeker to Ursa to Spirit Breaker. Each time I was sure I had the "right" hero, a better player would come along, expose my weaknesses, and teach me something new. I’m the worst loser I know and yet I played Dota 2 for nearly 100 hours before I could get my winning percentage above 50. Maybe if I could actually see that I was being dominated by 14-year-old kids listening to Darude’s Sandstorm on repeat, I might have felt sufficiently embarrassed to retreat in shame. I stuck through it, though, because, in the immortal words of Agent Smith, "as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery," and Dota delivers both with just enough victory to keep me titillated. And once I had a couple of hundred hours of experience under my belt, I too started passing on the sacred knowledge of Dota through the time-honored tradition of owning noobs.

I’M THE WORST LOSER I KNOW AND I’M ADDICTED TO A GAME THAT KEEPS KICKING MY ASS
This is not a game for the impatient. Success in Dota 2 requires the strategic forethought of chess, the unselfish teamwork of basketball, and the steely nerves of poker. None of those skills are acquired with ease and there’s no magic number of matches or hours played to achieve Dota competence. It’s a lot like learning a language: I never felt discrete upgrades in my knowledge and skill, but eventually I got to the point where I could tell you every typo in the game’s hero descriptions and every corner of its single asymmetric map.

Just know that the commitment required is on a whole different scale to other games. You could complete the epic Mass Effect trilogy (plus all of its expansion packs) in less time than it takes the average Dota player to familiarize himself with everything from Abbadon’s Aphotic Shield to Zeus’s Lightning Bolt. But that’s really the point. Mastering this game in 50 hours wouldn’t feel anywhere near as satisfying as taking a good 500...

Counter-Strike makes you work to enjoy the content, and you'll have to put many hours of play into it before enjoying the feeling of conquering it.

Weapons are a huge part of the series too, with CS:GO not an exception. Each round provides a cash sum based on your previous performance, and with this you can purchase armour, projectiles and weapons. Firearms range from standard assault rifles to shotguns and sniper rifles, and you'll want to experiment with each one to see which works best.

What makes Counter-Strike such a popular series - and what will no doubt make CS:GO the next big PC shooter - is the thrill of the ego chase. As you die, often continuously, the frustration is outweighed by an aspiration to do better. In a game where success is pinned on attention to detail, death often triggers an internal failure analysis that the player will mull over while waiting for a new session to load. It becomes a spiral of egging yourself on to do better - and if you become a good player, the game becomes a stage for you to parade your skills.

Global Offensive builds on the CS series by going through a significant checklist presented by its community and marking off as many points as possible. Gun game as its own separate mode? Check. Competitive capabilities built in? Check. Map balancing here and there? Check, check, check.

As a result, there are numerous upgrades that will adjust gameplay while also making accessibility far better. The wide range of grenades, for example, will likely make play more tactical - laying down incendiary grenades will thwart rushes, while decoys, which fake gunfire and fool radar points, are brilliant tools for messing with the minds of established players.

The actual core shooting will be a huge talking point for many months to come. It has been tinkered slightly and gives weapons a noticeably floaty feel, which doesn't sit well to begin with. We eventually found ourselves enamoured by it, and the impact of hits add a real tactile distinction to play.

It's what doesn't work, however, that is most notable. Regular mode has no new maps added to it, while all the new guns seem somewhat cosmetic. Global Offensive has also removed some of its middling weapons such as the MP5, essentially pushing even more players to stick with the AK and the M4. Sometimes it gives the impression that there is in fact less valuable content than in previous CS releases.

If one assumed this was Counter-Strike Source with a visual mod installed, there would often be little to shake that impression.

There's also now a split between casual and competitive servers - however, many players aren't yet aware of the differences, mainly because the distinction isn't made obvious enough. It becomes even more confusing if you join a community server with all hosts of mods installed on it, which have perhaps taken casual mode, turned friendly fire on and essentially made it as close to Source as possible.

At times, arranging games in Competitive Mode feels like a chore. Joining a five-on-five war is simple enough, but attempt to lobby up with a group of friends and join a game, and you'll often hit a snag. Myself and a few others tried to find a competitive game with no luck, simply being told that no servers were currently available.

When you finally do join, it works fine, but the wait and work required to find a game seems like a drawback. We eventually gave up and resorted to using IRC to find matches, as we would with Source.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is not the key evolution point that we were hoping for, and the response from the community often reflects this view. On many occasions, other players used phrases such as "same old" to us.

This is elementally Counter-Strike Source with some fine-tuning under the bonnet, and Valve appears to have acknowledged this with the reasonable RRP attached to it.

And yet the core DNA of the game has not lost its appeal. This is still a glorious experience that sets a benchmark for all multiplayer shooters. Valve's objective with Global Offensive was to draw together the active communities of both the Source and trusty 1.6 edition. It clearly has a good chance.