Thousands are playing Valve's unrevealed shooter Deadlock, a blend of Team Fortress 2 and Dota with Bioshocky skyrails

Valve's third-person hero shooter Deadlock hasn't been officially revealed yet, but thousands of you unscrupulous devils have been playing it thanks to stolen development builds. Speculation abounds that these "leaks", coupled with Valve's obstinate silence about it, are a calculated publisher psyop. Are they deliberately letting people play the game early so as to temper the marketing rollout in some way? Perhaps handle any initial player criticism under cover of non-announcement? It seems unlikely, but as other writers have pointed out, this is Valve, unaccountable elder god of PC gaming. I guess we should be thankful it isn't another Half-Life tease.

The scale of the leaks means we have a pretty solid idea of how Deadlock plays. In particular, the Verge's Sean Hollister has wangled his way into playing a few rounds of the leaked build, publishing some thoughts and thereby attracting the wrath of Valve's orbital banhammer.

The short version is that this is sort of Overwatch and Team Fortress 2 with more of a MOBA-style, lanes-and-creeps component, and a steampunk setting that reminds me of Dishonored's Dunwall (also, a microtransaction store, but you were expecting that). It's a 6v6 affair, and each team gets a retinue of NPC Troopers who spawn continually at your base and attempt to conquer a series of enemy positions. Smash through every opposing fortification, and you'll reach their base and fight their Patron - a huge, flying orb with arms. The game's heroes (there are 20 in the leaked development build) get light and heavy attacks plus a parry.

You can also trade resources from slain enemies for special abilities as the match goes on - for example: lifesteal, energy barriers, some kind of electro-grapple - but you can only do so back at base. Which is where the game's skyrails come in: these Bioshock Infinitesimal fixtures allow for rapid travel up and down each map lane. According to Hollister, the skyrails are laid out away from the map's major firing lines, so you can't just relentlessly use them to assault from the air.

As reported by SteamDB and passed along by jaunty RPS children's party impersonator PCGamer, the leaked development build peaked at 18,254 players yesterday. That makes it almost exactly as popular in the last 24 hours as Europa Universalis IV, a comparison I introduce because after 15 years of doing this, my mind has become a zero-sum hellscape in which games compete for my affections like Troopers vying to dismantle each other's Patrons... to predictably parachute in a final Deadlock analogy, because originality in games journalism is dead.

Fingers crossed Valve announce this soon, so we can write about it without glancing over our shoulders in fear of backstabbing. In the meantime, how about that Project White Sands, eh?