Bring a friend, expect to lose for a month, and you will find a game with more inside it than anything else here. The shop asks nothing of you but taste.
Dota 2 is Valve's free five-against-five strategy game, played on one map with well over a hundred heroes, all of them available from the first match. It is the most complex game on this atlas and the most generous: nothing in its shop changes a match. The price is patience. Your first ten games will be confusing and your first hundred will be humbling, and that is roughly the point.
The four bearings
- N5.5Newcomer · 20%
A serious tutorial, bot matches and a new-player queue help, but nothing makes the first week easy. The download is large and the learning curve is real.
- E9Every session · 35%
A single match can turn on one decision from any of ten players. Forty minutes that rarely feel the same twice, with the best replay and spectator tools in the genre.
- S9.5Staying power · 25%
Thirteen years of updates, a hero roster that keeps growing, and a competitive scene that gives the ordinary player something to study every season.
- W9Wallet · 20%
Every hero is free. Cosmetics, an optional Dota Plus subscription and occasional event passes are the whole shop, and none of it touches the match.
Weighted 20 / 35 / 25 / 20 into an Atlas score of 8.4. How the bearings work.
What you are actually doing
Two teams of five pick heroes, then fight over a map with three lanes, a jungle in between and a base at each end. You earn gold and experience by taking last hits on creeps and by defeating enemy heroes, spend the gold on items, and try to knock down the towers that guard the enemy base before they knock down yours. A match lasts thirty to fifty minutes and ends when one Ancient falls.
The complexity comes from the roster. Every one of the 127 heroes has four or more abilities, a talent tree and a shopping list, and every one of them is free from the start. That means your teammates might pick anything, the enemy might pick anything, and a match is a small argument between ten plans.
The first evening, honestly
Valve's tutorial is better than its reputation, and the bot matches are worth a full evening before you touch a real queue. The new-player experience limits your first matches to a smaller hero pool and puts you with other newcomers, which softens the landing without hiding the game. Ranked matchmaking is locked until you have a hundred hours in the game and a phone number linked to your Steam account, which is Valve's way of saying the same thing. Even so, most people describe their first week as being shouted at in a language they don't speak. It gets better around match thirty, and the moment it clicks is one of the best feelings on this chart.
Why it stays
Dota 2 rewards study. Every hero has a hundred small interactions with every other hero, the map changes with each major patch (7.41 in March 2026 touched 126 heroes; the latest letter patch, 7.41f, arrived on 15 September 2026), and the professional scene, culminating in The International each August, gives you a syllabus. Valve's replay system lets you watch any professional match from any player's point of view, which is the best free coaching in games. Steam's August 2026 figures show close to a million people playing at once at peak.
Where it shines, where it drags
- Every hero free, no power in the shop
- The deepest strategy game on the chart
- Best-in-class replay and spectator tools
- An enormous, still-active competitive scene
- A steep and sometimes hostile first month
- Matches are long and quitting early is punished
- PC only, with no console version; Steam lists 60 GB of space
- Voice and text chat can be unpleasant; muting is a skill
The toll: what it costs in the UK
Dota 2 costs nothing to install and nothing to play, and the whole roster is unlocked. What Valve sells is cosmetic: hero outfits, couriers, effects and the occasional event pass. Dota Plus is an optional monthly subscription that adds statistics, hero progression and a few conveniences.
- To install and playFree
- Dota Plus subscriptionOptional; price shown in the Steam client
- Cosmetic itemsFrom pennies to collector prices on the Steam Community Market
- Event and supporter bundlesOnly while an event runs; priced in-client
Randomised items: Yes, for cosmetics. Treasures are containers that give a random cosmetic from a listed pool, and the contents can be resold on the Steam Community Market. Nothing in them affects a match. We would not buy them; the market lets you buy the exact item you want instead.
Subscriptions and online play: No subscription is needed. Online play is free on Steam, and there is no offline mode beyond bot matches.
Prices checked 24 September 2026 on the UK stores named above. See Paying for games in the UK for the rights that apply to each payment route.
Who it suits
Players who enjoy strategy more than reflexes, who have at least one patient friend or the temperament to find some, and who are not put off by being bad at something for a while. If you want a team game you can pick up in a weekend, League of Legends is the kinder road.
Where to go next
Start with the Dota 2 waypoint for a first evening that goes well. Or compare it directly: Dota 2 or League of Legends.