Playing A Game Dota 2 PC

Compared to League of Legends, Dota 2 seems immediately deeper and more complicated -- while still fitting pretty cleanly within the mold of "based on a Warcraft III map." There are more mechanics at play, here, like messengers to shuttle items up from the shop, and "secret" item stores. And yet the core gameplay is still indistinguishable from micromanaging hero units in a Blizzard-styled strategy game.

Dota 2 suffers, comparatively, from a less-polished UI than LoL's - actually, it looks nicer, but is more difficult to navigate - and from not adequately explaining its additional mechanics, such as the massive and labyrinthine item and crafting shop. The game's "training" mode drops off after just a couple of levels, showing off some of the game's ropes and then hurling the player straight into the deep end of unguided combat; it's a fair start, but there are obvious missing pieces. To be fair, LoL's tutorial is also missing any semblance of strategic or tactical advice, but the omission seems more glaring in Dota 2.

As much as I admired LoL's model of giving characters away for free, Dota 2 does one better by giving all the characters away. Other than cosmetic customizations, I'm not sure that there even is anything to buy, here. So that's cool.

What I really want from Dota 2, even moreso than from its peers, is a full-fledged story mode. It has all the RTS-inspired features to support it, and the training missions even start off with background lore and narrated objectives. But this never really goes anywhere. Valve could use Dota 2's foundation to make a pretty radical story-driven small-scale strategy game, if it really cared to.

Progress: Did the first round of training missions, fought some bots.