Dota Underlords - Strategic auto-battler action

NEXT GENERATION AUTO-BATTLER

Dota Underlords emphasizes strategic thinking over quick reflexes. The game features engaging single-player and multiplayer modes, along with a level progression system that comes with various rewards. You can choose to play a standard strategy match, a fast-paced knockout game, or team up with a friend in co-op Duos mode.

SEASON ONE NOW ON OFFER

The first season introduces a City Crawl brimming with content, a Battle Pass filled with rewards, and numerous options for online or offline gameplay. Dota Underlords has officially launched and is ready for you to enjoy!

CITY CRAWL

The demise of Mama Eeb has created a power void in White Spire. Reclaim the city one neighborhood at a time and one Underlord at a time in the new City Crawl campaign. Tackle puzzle challenges, engage in quick street fights, and accomplish in-game tasks to unlock pathways and seize control of the city. Earn rewards such as fresh outfits for your Underlords, new wanted poster designs, victory dances, and titles.

BATTLE PASS

The inaugural season features a comprehensive Battle Pass providing more than 100 unique rewards. Participate in matches, complete challenges, and unlock new regions of the City Crawl to enhance your Battle Pass and gain rewards. These rewards comprise new boards, weather effects, profile customization, character skins, and other cosmetic upgrades. Many rewards can be obtained for free simply by playing. For additional benefits and content, players have the option to purchase the Battle Pass for $4.99 across all platforms. However, purchasing the paid Battle Pass is optional and does not grant any gameplay advantages.

WHITE SPIRE SEEKS A LEADER...

A towering city full of vice and grit, situated just outside the bounds of Stonehall and Revtel; White Spire is notorious for its rampant smuggling, dubious ethics, and vibrant inhabitants. Although plagued by syndicates, gangs, and secret societies, chaos has remained at bay due to one figure: Momma Eeb. She was held in high esteem… adored by the people… until her tragic murder just last week.

The question reverberating through White Spire’s underbelly after Eeb's death is a pressing one: who will take charge of the city?

STRATEGIZE TO WIN: Assemble heroes and empower them into stronger forms of themselves.

MIX AND MATCH: Each recruited hero can form distinctive alliances. Packing your team with allied heroes will trigger potent bonuses that can overpower your competitors.

UNDERLORDS: Select from four unique Underlords to guide your team towards triumph. Underlords are formidable units fighting alongside your crew, each offering distinct playstyles, perks, and capabilities.

CROSSPLAY: Choose your preferred platform and compete against players from around the world seamlessly. In a rush? Begin a match on your computer and complete it on your mobile device (or the other way around). Your Dota Underlords profile remains consistent across all devices, ensuring continuous progress regardless of the platform you're using.

RANKED MATCHMAKING: Everyone begins at the base level, but by competing against other Underlords, you'll rise through the ranks and demonstrate your worthiness to govern White Spire.

TOURNAMENT-READY: Create private lobbies and matches, inviting spectators to witness 8 Underlords battle it out.

OFFLINE PLAY: With advanced AI offering four difficulty levels, offline play serves as an excellent environment to refine your skills. You can pause and resume games whenever you please.

Dota Underlords beta rockets to 170,000 players after one day

Just 24 hours after the launch of the game’s open beta, Dota Underlords has hit more than 170,000 concurrent players.

Dota Underlords is a standalone game inspired by the immense popularity of Dota Auto Chess. The game was initially released exclusively to Battle Pass owners. Battle Pass owners were also rewarded with three “friends beta keys” to share with others.

Valve revealed the future of Auto Chess in a May blog post on the game.

“Valve and Drodo could not work directly with each other for a variety of reasons. We ended up agreeing that we’ll each build our own stand-alone version of the game, and support each other to the fullest,” Valve said at the time.

Drodo Studio has since released their own PC and mobile version of Dota Auto Chess under the name of “Auto Chess.” The game’s mechanics are identical to those of Dota Auto Chess, but names were changed and heroes were remastered. The game has seen continued success following the careful transition from Dota 2 client to a standalone version.

On the other hand, Dota Underlords built hype in both the Dota 2 and Auto Chess communities. Valve’s take to the famed Dota Auto Chess will be tested during the game’s early access period.

There are no changes being made to the game’s core mechanics, but there are a lot of added features. After every loot round from neutral creeps, players can now choose from three different items.

There are also global items available that can enhance the perks of each hero synergy. This will greatly help players to better determine the squads they’re trying to build.

Heroes from Dota Auto Chess were retained in Dota Underlords. Pudge and Warlock were newly added from the hero pool.

Dota Underlords is available on PC, iOS, and Android. The game features cross-play and cross-platform progression, so players will not be restricted to play on any one platform.

According to Valve, the open beta will last for a few months. The game will undergo several enhancements during this time based on community feedback.  

Wot I Think (now it's left beta): Dota Underlords

I'm in a good place with Dota Underlords. We're long past that initial rush, those halcyon days where layers of the puzzle kept peeling away, one after the other. We're past the rough patch, too, when it seemed like we were over. That long plateau. We're comfortable, now. I can see the path that leads from here, the subtle ways I can improve.

So what if the spark's gone? I've settled for less.

Dota Underlords is an autobattler. That means you're in charge of recruiting a wizard army to fight seven other wizard armies, one at a time, each assembled by another player. They battle automatically, and each time you lose a fight your health trickles down from one hundred. Last general standing wins.

Luck plays a crucial role. You recruit your wizards from a random selection of five, and can pay money to refresh what's up for grabs. Your goal is to level up heroes by collecting copies of them, while also building around alliance bonuses that confer game-changing effects, like buffing friendly damage or lowering enemy armour. You've also got to consider hero stats and abilities, counters, unit positioning, items, and gold management. There are a ridiculous number of variables. It's a hard game to play scientifically.

You will get a handle on them, eventually. It helps if you already recognise the heroes from Dota 2, and can look at a sentient slosh of water and immediately know it is an assassin. For the most part, though, Dunderlords is an entity unto itself. Once you've learnt the basics, every decision becomes subtle. Infuriatingly so, sometimes. Should you focus on upgrading that hero, or save your gold for expanding your army? Is that item better on your necromancer, or your time beetle? And where should you put that magic rhino?

One big, welcome change from the beta is that Dunderlords now lends a hand. It suggests which of your purchased heroes to field and where to put them, though there are times when you'll learn to overrule it. You might want to space out your heroes more if your enemy has scary area of effect spells, or plug in a hero from a different, more important alliance. For newcomers, though, that guidance is a merciful inclusion.

That said, the steepness of the learning curve is part of what makes it so satisfying to climb. There's a joy to transforming a twisting mass of potential synergies into something that works. Every now and then it coalesces into these glorious moments where your last hero clicks into place, and you finish off a handful of alliance bonuses. It's like sliding a piece of granite into a receptacle in an ancient tomb. Like you're building something that is meant to be.

It's interesting how all this translates to the singleplayer puzzles. Multiplayer is still very much Dunderlords' focus, but it now comes with an array of side dishes. They can be found in the City Crawl, which comes with some light plot dusting about various gangs attempting to take over town, and come in a few different flavours. Street fights pit you in best of three matches against an AI, where you start with a gaggle of pre-selected heroes. I can see how they'd benefit new players, teaching them about what works well against specific alliances. For the experienced, though, they're not quite calibrated right. I stomped through every one I played.

The more puzzley puzzles were much better. Here, you're pitted against a team you'd never see in multiplayer, and have to build around severe restrictions. With just four heroes and a limited amount of gold, how do you deal with four Bloodseekers equipped with hugely-damaging Divine Rapiers? What about six spirits armed with Blink Daggers? Questions like that pushed me to experiment, in conditions where I could easily see what worked and why. They taught me how vital positioning can be, where nudging one of my healers one square to the right made the difference between victory and defeat.

You can play a handful of these for free, but you'll need to stump up £4 for a battle pass to play the rest. It's a decent deal, especially if you care about accruing cosmetics, like new boards to fight on or graffiti to paint them with.

In multiplayer games, inscrutability is still Dunderlords' biggest weakness. I still find myself loosing matches, asking myself what went wrong, and resorting to a bemused shrug. Maybe I should have gone for different alliances. Maybe I should have picked the lizard-riding grandma rather than the old man on a horse. Maybe my positioning was off, or maybe I did everything right and my opponent just got luckier. You can't rule anything out.

Except, like I said, you do reach a point where some of this becomes clearer. Once you get a grasp on the key principles, your mind becomes free to analyse the specifics of your board, and you start coming up with satisfying micro-solutions. I think I won one game by making sure my buffing will o the wisp floated next to my main demonic damage dealer, though of course, I can't be sure.

It helps to take a long view. There is peace in accepting that some games will be duds. Chance is the game's lifeblood, and playing well is about cajoling the odds in your favour rather than overruling them. I can see why that might be off-putting, but if you've played card games like Hearthstone, you're more likely to be comfortable with the bargain. It's close to one you've made before.

Outside of the City Crawl, Dunderlords mostly feels very similar to how it did in beta. The introduction of actual Underlords to Underlords - four special heroes that you choose between once you reach a certain round - isn't as game-defining as you might think. You pick one, then go back to thinking about the same old stuff. But that's fine. There is already so much to mull over.