Deadlock’s newest support character, a sleepy owl-goblin creature called Rem, is just the littlest guy. He barely comes up to waist height when standing next to the towering tank Abrams, and if he crouches, he’s about the size of one of the breakable gold jars that decorate the map. He’s adorable! He’s also sneaky and slippery in ways that are completely novel for the genre, and despite his short stature, stands tall as the game’s most fascinating hero (the guy who can make portals has been demoted to a close second for me).
Sliding around on his pillow at full speed, he’s a bastard to hit. Rem’s head is pretty big, so most of his model is a crit spot, but he has plenty of movement tools to work with. Beyond the universal suite of slides, jumps, and air dashes, he can use his Tag Along ability to jump to an ally and stick to them. He can recast this while it’s active, letting him bounce from ally to ally like a pinball. Combine that with his throwable pillow, which displaces enemies when it hits them, and getting a bead on this guy becomes a one-of-a-kind pain.
This dynamic, where a hero’s height meaningfully impacts their power, barely exists in other MOBAs. Deadlock foregoes the RTS-inspired controls and camera angle that characterize the genre in favor of third-person shooting—in other words, it’s one of the only games in the genre where you can’t take your autoattack for granted. And while games like League of Legends are full of manually aimed skillshots and 3D MOBA Smite requires attacks to be aimed in the general direction of your foe, neither require nearly the same precision as Deadlock.
Part of that is just the fact that it’s a shooter where every single character is ranged and only one character’s gun truly locks on to foes, but the new patch leverages its camera angle and controls in completely unique ways.
There are tunnels all over the map now, and Rem is the only character small enough to access them without using an ability or Street Brawl-exclusive item. The only other character who can easily use them is Calico, but she has to limit herself to a cat form where she can’t dash, slide, attack, or use abilities. A few others like Drifter and Paradox can squeeze in through some unique interactions… but they need a tiny hero to lead the way, and they’re trapped once they get in.
These tunnels are a great way for Rem to get around the map more quickly than other heroes, and they let him slip away from fights even more than his core kit allows. This synergizes with his Lil Helpers, which he can use to buff lane creeps and steal souls from the enemy side of the map. He slinks behind enemy lines, secures a subtle advantage for his team, and retreats where almost no one can follow. There’s even one tunnel that provides a direct slide to the midboss, a crucial objective that can be stolen at the last second from any team trying to claim it, which lets him squeeze in for a steal more subtly than other heroes might.
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There are other, more incidental advantages afforded by his height. If you take cover behind a suitably high wall (or far enough from the edge of a rooftop, if viewed from below), your health bar is concealed, making you effectively invisible to other players. After some testing in the “Explore NYC” mode, I was able to find lots of little edge cases where Rem is automatically concealed in spaces where other heroes would have to crouch, as well as at least one small arch Rem could squeeze under without sliding.
Crouching slows you down and getting enough speed for a good slide can require a stamina-draining dash, so this meaningfully expands his juking potential. And since Rem’s ultimate lets him momentarily CC an entire enemy team with a sleep-inducing gaze that pierces walls, being hidden at the right time can make all the difference.
This all complements my very favorite aspect of Deadlock: the way its camera angle matters in a way that you can’t find even in the other big MOBAs. Where Smite’s third-person perspective is largely a novelty, Deadlock’s changes everything.
Camera obscura
This is a game where you don’t gank by casting your ult from a bush that makes you invisible, or using Blink Dagger from the fog of war, but by literally descending from the rooftops or rising out of a nearby tunnel. Frantic chases lead you down stairwells into a maze of tight corridors and dead-ends that fake you out with ghostly silhouettes. You can often evade what would be certain death in any other MOBA by taking advantage of the map’s verticality.
And if you have a keen eye, the increasingly labyrinthine map allows for absurd new levels of skill expression. Grey Talon, whose ultimate lets him manually fly an explosive owl around the map, can squeeze that projectile through the smallest of tunnels.
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These sorts of dynamics are more common in pure shooters. In Overwatch, for instance, the nimble hit-and-run assassin Tracer is smaller and harder to hit than a beefy tank like Reinhardt. On top of being good, communicative visual design, this serves a gameplay function; a stray shotgun blast is simply more likely to be soaked up by a big character, whose higher health pool is balanced out by how easy it is to hit them.
You usually only get a ghost of this in a game like League of Legends or Dota. Certain characters are larger than others, but it only has a marginal impact. Cho’gath and Zac can grow over the size of a match to ridiculous sizes, and each bit of growth increases their attack range and hit box size a bit. Dota’s Undying grows to huge sizes as he steals enemy strength, making him easier to click, but his hitbox doesn’t change. In most other cases in Dota and in other MOBAs, size indicates roughly how big a hero’s hitbox is, but all this is still less impactful than in a typical shooter—or in Deadlock, since the overhead camera shows the action in wide shot with perfect clarity.
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Anyone can still become invisible in League by standing in tall grass, and while a fully stacked Cho’gath can shield his puny allies from certain skill shots with his giant face, a long-range attack damage carry player can simply right-click whoever he’s protecting. There’s nothing on the level of a secret tunnel system only yordles can access, the challenge of carefully threading a skill shot through said tunnels, or the fundamental need to aim every shot.
It’s all part of why Deadlock, though it is more MOBA than hero shooter, transforms the genre with the aspects of the shooter that it does embrace. To me, Rem indicates that Valve is looking to push the envelope in this regard even further, and I’m eager to see what the best players are capable of given time.
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