Recent reviews by FUR

It's a pretty well-made for season 1. You can tell that the devs are putting in a lot of work with good communication and bug fixes. Imagine if TF2 was released today xD.

Disclaimer: I'm reviewing it from an autochess genre perspective. Autochess in general will have randomness to it's gameplay mechanic. I'm not here to debate whether it should be a game genre or not for the general public.

Scroll to the bottom for TL;DR.

Anyway,
This is a fresh take on autochess genre with the addition of underlords (additional unit that offers offensive and defensive abilities). Each underlord have two variant of spells you can choose at random each game. If you find that the Support variant of Jull doesn't match with your lineup, you can look for another viable underlord. This keeps you thinking about your next move as the game progresses. There's also a Dota Underlord version of Dota 2's Turbo which is Knockouts. Game lasts around 4-5 mins which is great if you wanna game while you are finding your next Dota 2 game. The basic concept of this game is still similar to the original autochess. So if you liked autochess games, this would be fine for you too.

In Dota 2, the core gameplay of the game is basically the same every game. How did Dota 2 survive over the years? Dota 2 have a ranked system that keeps players coming back to grind to be the best. Other than that, Dota Plus provides a hero level progression to unlock rewards, seasonal mini battlepass (i.e. Frostivus 2019 and New Bloom 2020) and once a year The International Battlepass progression bar that gives tons of rewards. HOWEVER, half of it are locked behind a price (i.e. Dota Plus and TI Battlepass).

In Dota Underlords, these kind of incentives to keep coming back are less money orientated. To start, we have the battlepass. It has 100 level progression with rewards at every level. There are 24 free rewards in the 100 levels even if you didn't spend anything. There are however a long gap in between some rewards but for a free battlepass, it's not too bad considering you get some pretty good effects and portraits along the way. Next, there is the new White Spire City Crawl that gives you puzzles, challenges and street fights. Puzzles will match you against a strong army but allow you to build anything(including upgrading them to 3 stars right away) from the restricted alliances with a limited gold. Challenges are well, challenges you have to do while using a certain underlord. This will force players to try out different alliances and builds which is fun. Street fights are knockouts against bots and its difficulty will be higher the deeper you are in the city crawl. You will get roughly 16 missions to do for each underlord (16x4 = 64) for free. There are more missions if you are willing to pay for the premium battlepass but so far the 16 missions on one side already take up a lot of my time. Did I mentioned that there's ranked as well? And of course, you can even play in your phone when you're not at home which is a big plus. Cross-play is available which is amazing.

On the mobile Dota Underlords, it runs quite bad on my low end smartphone. With all the video settings turned all the way down, i can get barely 20fps in battle and most of the time, delays and freeze. I understand that this is mostly because of my smartphone's specs being bad but i feel like the game is not well optimized for mobile like other mobile games. It is not unplayable as i can still reliably pick my heroes and sell my useless one-star bloodseeker at round 20. It's still nice to play this on your phone just to complete the city crawl especially the Enno's Crew street fight (This took me close to an hour and half to solve).

Cosmetic wise, it have everything you can put hats on in a board game. You can change your barricade's look, dummy's look, side board props, sprays and lots and lots of particles. You can tell Valve have some experience in making hats XD. It will be interesting to see how the devs will implement new kind of cosmetics (perhaps an immortal for underlords that changes animations). More hats please. However I do want to see better optimization for mobile especially lower end before implementing.

Overall :
Core gameplay based on the genre itself : 9/10
Incentives to play more : 8.5/10
Able to experience the game even without paying : 7.5/10
Mobile support : Yes , 6.5/10
Cosmetics : DUH, it's valve 8/10
Cross-play : Yes

Had insane amount of fun playing it. With a little rage in between. Still pretty good!