Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
To continue on from last month’s developing story: What was briefly known as Dota Auto-Chess is now known as Dota Underlords. It appears that the Valve v Drodo Studios fight turned into a two-part resolution. One version is called Auto-Chess which is basically a Drodo Studios & Origin collaboration. Auto-Chess is NOT available on Linux as it’s being released by Origin which has traditionally not been very Linux friendly. The other version, and the one we’re reviewing this month, is called Dota Underlords. Currently, Dota Underlords is available on Windows PC, Mac OS X, Linux, Android, and iOS. Dota Underlords is being released by Valve Corporation, the company behind Steam, the popular digital distribution gaming platform.
Dota Underlords is an 8-player strategy video game which was originally developed as a mod for Dota 2. On Ubuntu Linux, you can play the game by downloading it for free from Steam. Last month, I reviewed the original mod version of the game. This month, we’ll be looking at the Valve version of the game. There are quite a few differences between the original Dota Auto-Chess and the official Dota Underlords, which is the Valve version. For the most part, the game is exactly the same, but, with the full backing from Valve, the new updated version is much more polished and a lot easier to play and understand. This is a very fun game to play, easy to learn, but extremely hard to master.
To begin with, Dota Underlords actually has a few options available that the original didn’t have. For example, Dota Underlords has a very well-put-together tutorial which makes learning the game a lot easier than it was with the original version. The tutorial makes a great effort in explaining to the novice how the game is played in its most basic form. In addition to this tutorial, there is also the opportunity to play against bots if you feel inclined to do so before jumping into an online 8v8 battle. Once you actually begin playing online against other players, the real fun begins, as there are different strategies that people have put together. There are already a whole bunch of video tutorials and guides available on both youtube.com as well as twitch.tv which can help you master the game.
The basic rundown goes as follows: The first 10 rounds of each game are played against the computer, then you begin fighting other players chosen randomly from the pool of 8 players that you started with. As you progress through the rounds, the players with the worst scores begin to get eliminated until there are only three players left who are then ranked from first to third. It usually takes about an hour to get to this point – which is the one downside to this game. Unless you’re doing the tutorial or playing against bots, you’re pretty much forced to spend a minimum of about an hour playing the game. The game is seen as basically having three phases: early, mid & late phase.
The game is very fun to play and it has become Valve’s surprise savior. A couple of years ago, Valve released Artifact which was to become Valve’s boardgame hit, but, instead, it fell flat and went down from there. Enter Dota Underlords, a chess-like game which has been very favorably received by the community. All of the things that Valve wanted but failed to get with Artifact miraculously landed right onto our consoles in the form of Dota Underlords. The graphics are quite exquisite and the game-play is superb. If interested in a rundown of how to play the game, please refer to last month’s video game article which explained the basics of the original mod which is almost exactly the same in this official version.
I give Dota Underlords 4½ out of 5 stars – with half of a star being deducted for not having a shorter game option available for the online battles, something similar to Dota 2’s Turbo mode which turns an otherwise hour-long game into about an average of 15 minutes for Dota 2 games. Other than that, the game is awesome and very fun to play. I strongly recommend you check it out, most definitely if you’re into board-games.