How to get started with Valve’s ‘Deadlock’

When the news came learned that thousands of players were already playing Valve’s “secret” game Impasse on Steam in August, many people’s first reaction was: How do I get my hands on this?

Since then, many other players have joined the invite-only playtest, allowing them to get their first look at the project. Valve made the game public on Steam a few weeks ago, but didn’t give the game a release date. “Impasse is a multiplayer game in early development,” Valve wrote on the game’s Steam page.

If you’re not already playing and you’re curious, here’s what you should know.

what is Impasse and why are people so excited about it?

Valve, the renowned developer of franchises such as Half-Life, Portaland Counter Strike, has slowed its development of new titles a lot, so any new IP is cause for excitement. Impasse is a six-on-six team game that combines the personality of the hero shooter, for example, Overwatch, Apex Legendsand Valve’s Team Fortress 2 with some of the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) mechanics popularized by league of legends and Valve’s Dota 2.

A MOBA usually has elements like home bases, towers that each side must defend, minions that help the main characters in battles, and a progressive increase in abilities over the course of a match. If you’ve never played a MOBA, Impasse it can feel overwhelming at first due to the resource management it requires in addition to the action elements.

OK, I’m sold. how do i play

You’ll need a Steam account and a playtest invite. Some players have been randomly invited by Valve to play the game, possibly based on their history with other Valve titles, but the easiest way to enter is to ask someone in the playtest to invite you, which is a menu option in game.

To see which of your Steam friends are playing Impassevisit the game page and look in the right panel under Friends Who Play.

An invitation may take a day or more to reach you once it is sent. When you have it, you can download and install the game.

This might be a good place to warn you: Impasse it is a work in progress and as such is liable to change a lot between now and its official release. As of this writing, there is only one map, called “street_test”, and the list of 21 heroes and their abilities may evolve with future updates.

My playgroup found the game remarkably stable and polished considering it’s so early in its development, but that doesn’t mean you won’t run into bugs, glitches, or crashes in the game. The playtest is free; don’t expect the kind of customer support or full experience you’d get with a retail game.

Learning the Ropes (and Rails)

First thing’s first: whether you have MOBA experience or not, Deadlock’s a set of tutorials under Learn to Play is a must. They’ll show you how items and commands work in Starter Notion, how to familiarize yourself with the game’s 21 characters and their “built” skill sets in Hero Training, and how paths to victory work in Lane Training, a guided search through the city map.

Once you’ve completed these three guides, you’ll have the basics of how the controls work, how to purchase and level up your character’s items and abilities during a match, and how souls, the game’s currency, work.