Dota Underlords

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

Generally I play a lot of story centred games, call me a fan of walking simulators and I will not be offended. Sometimes I just want to move around a nice world and read some nice stuff. A short hike, Donut County, Dream Daddy, Dreamfall, Gone Home, Life is Strange, Thomas was Alone. That kind of stuff.
Dota Underlords is pretty different to the above but it still succeeded where League of Legends, actual Dota, Hearthstone or Slay the Spire didn't.
Firstly, I'm pretty bad at this game. I don't have a natural talent for memorising large swathes of trivia about intricate rule systems. I have trouble seeing the big picture and tend to get tunnel vision on a small area of information, which in a game where you want to be comprehending the overall strength of your team and how your team's character's abilities support and enhance each other, that's kind of a problem. ALSO I'm bad at evaluating a large swathe of options relative to the other competitor's teams and the existing construction of my team.
So if I'm so poorly suited to playing this then why do I enjoy it?
1. The battles play out automatically and all I do is construct the team and then watch them do their thing with some consideration to character positioning on the board also playing a part. This creates breaks and makes it less taxing than say a Dota or an overwatch.
2. I do visual stuff as my day job and the way the synergies are organised by colour is a major help to the way I process information, it's easier for me to run my eyes across my team synergies and immediately see "Oh..I'm building too many synergies and if I cut this character I can focus into a team that has clarity of style." (I'm really bad at just...remembering all this stuff so being able to re-check what the current state of my team is is necessary to my poor brain.)
3. The four round knockout mode of gameplay is what I needed to get myself over the initial hump of needing to be familiar with the different synergies, characters and abilities enough that I can look at a battle play out and have some kind of sense of the forces at play within what was previously just a frenetic unintelligible mess of fighting characters. Four round knock out lets me try different variations on the same tune and see the effects of making small tweaks that going through a full length game doesn't allow so easily.
So I guess those are the main things. OH I also love that I can play with a friend and the way they make that teamwork a real part of the experience. So I can send my friend gold which is neat but what is really neat is that when I open the shop between rounds and the characters for sale renew, it shows me what characters I am already building but ALSO now it shows me in a second bar what characters my friend is building. So if things aren't going so great for me I can still feel kind of useful because I can send them a character that completes a set and allows theirs to level up to a 2 star or a 3 star. This is GREAT, I can support my friend and make their game go better which is just RAD.
Anyway, this is the most I've stuck with a game of this kind so it's doing something a little different, whether that makes it enjoyable to me personally but like...not actually a good version of the multiplayer/competitive thing it is seemingly aimed at being is difficult to tell though.

Dota Underlords is free to play and is an auto battler game.
Born out of the well known Autochess mod for Dota2 Underlords is a standalone game. A knowledge of Dota2 is not necessary at all.
You pick your heroes and place them on the chessboard and they fight by themself against the enemy heroes. Round by round you try to form alliances. "Stacking your team with allied heroes will unlock powerful bonuses that can crush your rivals." However, RNG plays a big role here, units you can pick are offered random every round.
Dota Underlords features crossplay between PC and mobile (Android/IOS). Your profile in Dota Underlords is shared across all devices (Steam login).
The game is fun and kinda addictive for a while. I personaly lost the interest after 177 hours.
The graphics are ok, from my point of view the original Autochess had way better graphics. It is even looking worse on mobile platform. But it is not all about the graphics...
If you are searching for a free online game as a time waster which you can also play with your phone, you should give Dota Underlords definitely a try.
Sounds 8/10
Graphics 6/10
Gameplay 7/10
Atmosphere 8/10
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Good but would be better if they took the 'Underlord' heroes out

If you love DoTA and its universe - it's a game 4u.
I love this game.

Probably my favourite mobile game out there. Underlords is completely free, doesn't have any ads and is quite rewarding.
It offers strategic depth while having a relatively simple concept. The meta changes every once in a while. I know some people that find the game stale every once in a while but I can't say so.
It plays a bit better on PC than on your phone, but unless you are insanely high ranked, the odds are quite even when playing on mobile. I definetly encourage you to try this game out!

Dota Underlords is the same Auto Chess game from the Dota 2 mod but made officially by Valve. If you don't know what that is give "Auto Chess" a quick YouTube search and there's a few videos explaining the Auto Battler genre. This IGN video from 2019 gives a pretty clear overview of the genre despite its now outdated hype and footage.
The Good
Dota Underlords is a lot more streamlined and has a vastly improved UI than the mod and other competing Auto Battlers, with all necessary information now available in the in-game Rulebook (much better than scouring forums, YouTube and wikis for the basics on team synergies and unit stats). It's very quick to learn because of this and the very handy pauseable single player mode.
The game also has a lot of personality in its voicelines and cosmetics and the addition of the Underlords (special boss units) is a nice touch. The removal of the carrier unit/donkey is also a nice addition as items and gold are now automatically collected. The game also gets a nominal thumbs up for not including Pay-To-Win mechanics.
The Bad
Unfortunately it seems like Dota Underlords may have been put on life support as there's only been one major content update since release but that could very well be because of outside factors like Covid-19 (although it is worth noting that the Auto Battler genre is well past the fad stage it enjoyed in 2019/2020).
Other than that the only thing that the game suffers from is a lack of depth when compared to other titles in the genre, a symptom of the aforementioned streamlining of the game.
The Conclusion
At time of writing it's definitely worth trying considering it's free with no pay-to-win mechanics and is very quick to learn thanks to the stated Rulebook and pauseable single player mode. Give it a go.
The Competition
While we're here, it's also worth noting that there are currently three other Auto Battler games available outside of Steam that are Free To Play as well. These are Auto Chess by Drodo and Dragonest Co.Ltd (the original Dota 2 mod team), Team Fight Tactics by Riot and Might & Magic: Chess Royale by Ubisoft.
Might & Magic: Chess Royale is the most divergent title in the genre and tries several things to shake up the formula. None of these are worth mentioning however, as the game is flat out not worth your time due to it clearly being a straight mobile port with no thought to desktop use that's also riddled with Pay-To-Win mechanics.
Team Fight Tactics is a very good offering and plays almost identically to the original mod, with a couple of innovations here and there. It's by far the more in depth offering and ultimately the better game but suffers in the UI department when compared to Dota Underlords. Migrate to this if you find Dota Underlords too shallow.
I have yet to play the standalone release of Auto Chess but will update this when I do.