I got a playtest invite for Deadlock, Valve’s new hero shooter
that they still haven’t acknowledged exists, and played a few matches over the weekend. It’s quite tongue-in-cheek when the first thing you see isn’t an NDA agreement, but rather a message that just says “don’t share anything with anyone about this game”. Not sure what will happen if I go into full depth about what I experienced, so I won’t say much beyond what is already available to read online.
It’s a third person hero shooter, easiest to describe as a mix between Overwatch and DOTA. Gameplay wise it feels very fluid, with lots of nice hero variation to allow many different playstyles. The character designs are so awesome and have lots of unique character designs. I’m getting that feeling of witnessing a brand new Valve game come to life and it’s so exciting to me even if I don’t think I’ll be huge on this game in the future. It has the potential to be a very great game, not sure if it will reach the same esports heights as DOTA or Counterstrike, but I’m just not much of a MOBA player myself. It’s really just the fact that this is a brand new Valve game that has me excited.
I was also gifted Drug Dealer Simulator from a friend and I felt obligated to play it. I will say… the gameplay loop is actually quite
addicting (pun fully intended). I was expecting a cheaply made abandonware kind of game, but admittedly it is actually quite well made, even if it is kind of an Unreal Engine asset flip in many ways. There seems to be a lot of depth in this game, although you do have to grind quite a lot to get to the bigger features later on. You spend your time buying large quantities of the drugs, bring it back to your apartment, take orders from your laptop, package the smaller portions, then go and deliver them. Along the way you have to watch out for police roaming around, who seem to get harder with each passing day. There are certain areas you have to go through a police checkpoint to pass, so either you have to find an alternate path, or throw your backpack over the fence, go through the checkpoint, then retrieve your backpack.
Honestly, I played about 5 hours over the weekend and had fun. It is very grindy and I don’t know if I really have it in me to continue because the game does seem to keep getting more complicated with all the different features there are, but I can’t lie and say I didn’t have some sort of fun with it. The dialogues suck though, they try to make it seem so edgy and “badass”, which I don’t think serves it well. If you’ve watched drug-centric shows/movies such as The Wire, people there talk a lot more realistically and don’t try too hard to be edgy. My only explanation is that this game has a lot of eurojank qualities to it.
One thing I found very strange that I just chalked up to being eurojank is the frequent use of the word “Pathology”. It’s spray painted on a lot of walls, the narrator mentioned something about it, and sometimes when police search you, they let you go and say “fuckin’ patho”. Patho? I have never heard anyone in America use that word, and I am unsure of the context it’s used in this game. It’s like the game wants to have some sort of philosophical side to the story or whatever. Simply put, pathology is the study of diseases, maybe what the game is saying is being addicted to drugs is a disease, so you are a pathological person studying the effects it has on people? I seriously have no idea, it’s so strange and the game keeps mentioning it like it’s something Americans talk about frequently. Do Polish people talk about pathology and call people patho’s often? Anyways, weird but kind of fun game, wouldn’t recommend anyone actually spend money on it unless it’s deeply discounted.
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