Quote:There’s an adage that the Dota 2 community often quotes when someone identifies themselves as a new player. “Welcome to Dota 2!” They say, with open arms, before concluding with, “You suck.” They're not wrong: for the first dozen hours or so, you'll be bombarded with too much information and an often unforgiving community of extremely competitive players. But if you persevere, Dota 2 becomes one of the most rewarding and tense team-based multiplayer experiences anywhere in gaming. It's an achievement owed to uncompromising depth, a ridiculously generous free-to-play model, and the great features developer Valve has built up around it.

Quote:Dota 2's hero selection is a riot of interdimensional colour. Glittering knights, night terrors, two undersea beasts, their sea captain rival, steampunk eccentricities, ghosts, scholars, murderers, abominations, concepts and careerists. But everything's a bit sideways in its voice acting, animation, backstory and powers. Despite every hero being a megalomaniacal psycho, there's often something laughable about them. One of the heroes is just a spider. She picks a lane, covers it in web and spawns a horde of babies, alternately hissing about her "mother's love" and thirst for liquids.

Quote:60 seconds later we'd made our choices and were in the longest 60 seconds of any Dota 2 match. That of spawning, doing some shopping, wandering the map and getting in lane before the match begins. The Dota 2 equivalent of sportsmen stretching their legs. Or at least, that's probably what the other team were doing. We were still yelling.

Quote:I'm experiencing a thrill I've never found in a game before - that of giggling my way through the opening of a multiplayer match because if the other guys haven't seen Brood Mother before, I'll represent something utterly alien. Which, again, is a misconception around Dota. It's not a game where you have to learn 108 heroes. It's a game where you will learn 108 heroes, because that's part of the fun.

Quote:A deep and rewarding competitive game that becomes something special when taken on in the company of others.