Recent reviews by PrototypeInSession

Best FPS made so far. No competition.

I highly recommend DotA 2, and for good reason. I've played a stupid amount of the game, to be honest, so I thought I might as well write about my opinions of it.
Great Points:
1. Great replayability
2. Really fun with friends
3. Great joys when you pull off that amazing move
4. Really, really high skill ceiling
5. Over 105 heroes to play, most with a unique style of play accompanied with them
6. Huge amount of items to select from
7. The casual player has a spot in this, too, thanks to the new system!
8. Ranked Matchmaking vs. Non-Ranked matchmaking, and a punishment for abandoning
Some down-points

1. The entry barrier:
a. It’s similar to a C
b. Once you pass the bubble, it’s easy to get better, but passing the outer shell is the hard part.

2. Community
a. A lot of the community is really annoying, mean, and sometimes downright cruel. I find that this is about 10-20% of the community, and I find one in every 3 games or so.
b. These people usually try to play low-skill heroes and blame you for making mistakes even if the mistake is theirs, regardless of their status in the relationship.
c. Sometimes language barriers make the game far less entertaining, with the majority of minority languages not being on the list for language preferences

3. The lopsided nature of the game
a. Unless you find yourself being amazing, most games tip in the first five minutes and the team that tipped it either turns it around immediately or they lose, with only a few exceptions that lead to fantastic games.

Now then, I’ve gushed and ranted about the game enough, I’ll go explain the basic concepts of Dota
2, if you plan to get in on the action but aren’t sure if it's worth your time yet.

A. There are three lanes, considered either “hardlane/offlane,” “mid,” or “safelane,” and these differ where they are depending upon your faction.

B. There are two factions in DotA – one is based in the upper right hand corner of the map, known as the Dire, and the other team is in the lower left hand corner of the map, known as the Radiant.

C. After initial hero selection is finished, with one of the many gamemodes

a. Random Draft (20 heroes, cycles between teams to pick heroes in groups of two/one at a time)

b. All Pick (Everyone picks any hero they wish all at once)

c. Captain’s Mode - A Captain selects heroes and bans heroes, taking turns with the opposing team)

d. Captain’s Draft - 24 heroes, see Captain’s Mode for rest)

e. All Random - Everyone gets a random hero, my personal favorite, especially for learning all the heroes all over again)

f. Least Played - Every person picks from all the heroes, minus their 40 most played. Also good for learning, but not the best.)

g. Limited Heroes – Everyone picks from a pool of heroes chosen by Valve which generally have a lower skill ceiling and are easier to play than regular heroes. Some people say this is best for learning, but I find that these heroes leave a bad impression of DotA, due to the cheap nature of some of the heroes.

h. Single Draft – Everyone picks from three random heroes, one with an agility specialty, one with a strength specialty, and one with an intelligence specialty.

i. Occasionally, special events happen from time to time during holidays, but those are ignored for the purpose of this review.

D. After loading the game, you normally will either select a build you made yourself, or using the book icon in the top left hand corner of the screen, you can select a build someone else made that was reviewed by the community as either good or bad, and they can help eliminate the initial difficulty if you’re new to this hero.

E. Once the first minute or so is finished, creep waves begin to spawn. They consist of three melee creeps, and one ranged creep, which slowly increase in power throughout the game, until they hit a cap. Creeps run at normal speed in the hard-lane and the mid-lane, but faster in the safe-lane so that creeps end up towards the middle of the lane, as opposed to being lopsided.

F. Towers defend major points in the waves, and award money for being killed. You can also earn money by being the person to get the last hit on creeps.

G. Different people talk about different phases of the game, but essentially there are two different phases, with sub-phases in between, or inside.
a. Laning Phase – A distribution of heroes goes to the different lanes to kill creeps, gain experience, and earn money.
b. Team fight Phase – All the heroes go together to throw spells and attacks at each other.

After that, it’s just a combination of a bunch of the events previously described – that’s DotA in a nutshell. Now, why would you want to play a game that resets all your progress after you finish a match?

Well, in my opinion, it means that nobody ever has a major advantage over another player, such as PvP in other online games with loot-driven systems.

You can meet new people, make friends, and have a new experience every single game. With 106 heroes as of this patch, there’s somewhere around 1.1e20’s worth of possible matchups. There’s many roles to be played, and much fun to be had. Now, if I’ve convinced you – Go play dota! And if I somehow didn’t convince you, then go enjoy whatever game it is you play.

And apologies for the formatting, steam review's lack of HTML formatting made it a little harder!

I would rate this as probably the second best ARPG I've ever played. The Elite difficulty isn't as difficult as, say, demon souls, or Diablo 2's Hell difficulty, but other than that it's really quite a lot of fun. If you have friends, playing coop couldn't hurt! The only annoying part is having to re-host the map every time you want to respawn a boss.
Pros:
Loot, 75% balanced, Diverse Skill trees, Diverse Game
Cons: Not for the hardcore *I WANT TO DIE* gamers, not the greatest graphics, and its not a ton of fun by yourself
I give this game a 8.35/10 (I subtract .15 for a game-save-destroying bug that made me lose ~14 hours of progress.)