1 week Ago By Matt Cox
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: running away is the best feeling in videogames. More specifically, being chased is the best feeling in videogames, a sentiment I’d happen to share with my golden retriever if you replaced the word “videogames” with “the universe”. He is a purer being, but he’ll also never know the joy of executing a rail-dismount into a dashing corner-jump escape in Deadlock , and for this he deserves our pity.
It’s easy to miss if you haven’t played for at least a few hours, but Deadlock packs one of the most engaging movement systems this side of Tribes Ascend. Your movement kit seems simple enough at first, with rolling, crouch-sliding and air-dashing only mildly spiced up by a dash boost that requires careful timing. I’ll stress, though, that those tools are already enough to make you feel nice and nimble, especially once you get a handle on the bunny-hop slide combo that lets you zip around while tucking into the infinite ammo you get whenever you slide.
Valve could have stopped there and I’d probably still be hunched over Deadlock every evening. That’s plenty enough to keep your fingers busy, even before we get to the properly fiddly stuff. The map is littered with slopes to slide down, which you ideally want to pair with the dash jump so you can take advantage of increased momentum, distance, and slidey infinite ammo fun times.
That means whenever you’re going anywhere, be that in the midst of a fight or just traversing the map, you’re rewarded for scanning your environment and taking advantage of what you see. Jump pads and climbable ropes elevate this further, letting you get the drop on folks if you know when to shimmy upwards rather than stroll around a corner - and you can, of course, boost down the ziplines on each lane to catapult yourself into the fray. But that’s just the tip of the Icefrog.
You can wall jump, and you can wall corner jump to go twice as high. You can double tap down to fall faster, a move that shines when shaking off pursuers in a rooftop chase. You can use your heavy melee to propel yourself forwards, pulling off tricksy manoeuvres that let you reach places without dipping into precious stamina.
Nobody’s sure if this is a bug or a permanent feature, but you can also dismount ziplines by crouching, exploiting a two second window of zero air drag to get around just that little bit faster. The term isn’t Deadlock specific (I believe originating from fighting games), but people refer to the above as “movement tech”, which conveys both a certain snazziness and the skill check on some of the more advanced moves. We’ve now left the basics behind to join the realm of YouTube schmovement gurus, who have guides on all sorts of specific manoeuvres.
The in-game tutorial tells you about wall-jumping, for instance: it doesn’t tell you about the gnarly escape route from the secret shop where you can pop out of the ceiling hatch without using any stamina by combining a wall-jump and a perfectly-timed heavy melee. Threading these techniques together can feel tremendously satisfying. A pal pointed out the similarity to chaining stunts back to back in a Tony Hawk game, and he’s not wrong, but here the stunts are all the more rewarding for their presence in a MOBA context.
This is a genre where trudging around the map is an integral part of the experience, killing helpless creatures to soak up gold and XP so you can eventually murder the enemy players you’re there to fight. But Deadlock turns that genre pitfall on its head! Making movement fun alleviates the tedium, and making it fiddly and complicated means mastering it gives you an edge: every second you can shave off your rotations is one you can spend hoovering up more souls than your opponents. Deep and satisfying movement winds up combining intrinsic and extrinsic rewards in one speedy, parkour package.
And those are just the basic moves you get by default! Every hero is also free to snap up mobility-focused items, like the aptly named Majestic Leap that sends you hurtling through the air, packing its own nuances thanks to a cancelable secondary downward dash that lets you almost double its range and flexibility. There’s Warp Stone, a simple but nifty short-range teleport. There’s the Magic Carpet, which summons a rug that whisks you into the sky and back to base.
Then there’s Superior Stamina, which gives you heaps more stamina to work with while allowing you to both air-dash and double jump twice before your boots hit the ground again. Dizzying stuff. And then, and then!, naturally, some heroes lean into mobility with their own tricks.
Lash is an obvious highlight. He’s (canonically) an arsehole with a grappling hook and a ground slam attack with damage that scales based on height, leading to vids of people demonstrating how to do specific jumps that let you farm a jungle camp in a split second. A shout out also to Abrams, a big blue burly detective who likes charging at people, and the YouTube guy who’s made multiple deep dives into how to take advantage of niche interactions between his abilities and certain items to maximise your mobility and effectiveness.
I like those two, but for me Deadlock has pretty much become the Pocket game. He’s by far the most in-and-out, hit-and-run bastard in the game, thus maximising the amount of time I get to spend being chased thanks to a magical coat he can teleport to and a satchel he can duck inside of to briefly become invulnerable. He also has a barrage ability that’s best executed while soaring through the air, which is handy because activating that barrage while airborne lets you float forwards while preserving all your horizontal momentum.
I’ve developed a knack for popping myself into the air with wall jumps into barrages whenever the situation suits it, but that’s baby stuff. I’m still trying to nail corner jumps, where you dash-jump towards a corner or a curved surface, turn away 80 degrees to prevent the mantle animation, then wall-jump away to gain twice the elevation you usually would. It’s not impossible the devs will patch that double boost out, but I’ve a feeling they won’t.
Allowing legitimate techniques to arise from unintended quirks is the philosophy MOBAs were built on, after all. Part of what makes the genre in general so compelling is that its complexities make such fertile ground for that feeling of edging towards mastery, with so many nuances wriggling underfoot that every match unearths new ones to pick at. It delights me that Deadlock extends that to the fundamental act of just getting around, marrying the kinetic thrill of movement shooters to the cerebral strategy demanded by MOBAs.
I haven’t even stepped into the world of animation cancelling yet, where you buy specific items solely so you can extend your air-time by activating them to cut short your heavy melee. I’ve played for 250 hours already and my plate’s still overflowing with new stuff to learn, which is especially wild considering Valve are still in the early stages of piling stuff on to it. This is an alpha! The heroes and items we have access to now will likely be a fraction of the toys we’ll be playing with in a couple year’s time.
In the last update Valve added a mode where people can try out in-development heroes, including a frogman who can zoom around the map while sliding UP slopes as if they were downhill. I can’t wait to run away from him..
