DotA 2
Review

DotA 2 (2013) (Defence of the Ancients) is a series of fighting and shooting games where you battle enemies and human-controlled characters in online matches. The aim is to destroy the other team's Ancient artefact using one of the many characters. Similar to League of Legends, it encourages collaboration between players on your team. However, here the focus is on a vast range of heroes and equipment that offer more novelty to the encounters.

At the beginning of each match, you choose a hero with unique abilities that start relatively weak but are developed by items you find in the world. In this way, you work with your teammates to destroy the other team's base while defending your own. Compared to League of Legends, the gameplay is more complex with a steeper learning curve, requiring you to use a combination of skill and practice to win.

The game's regular updates add new characters and game modes, which switch up the objective or add restrictions to the type of characters usable in the match, but there is always a strong emphasis on teamwork. There is a large esports scene for the game, hosted by Valve, the parent company of Steam and the game's publisher, with a prize pool of US$30 million. It started as a fan-made game that became so popular it got an official release, and it is currently one of the most played games on PC, often with over a million concurrent players.

The game's popularity has led to the creation of comic books and cartoon series as well as two spin-off games:

• Artifact, a digital card-collecting game
• DotA Underlords, an auto-battling game

Our examiner, Ben Kendall, first checked DotA 2 2 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 8 weeks ago.