A work of art. A timeless masterpiece. The pinnacle of level design mastery. Many things have been said about Bombsite A – but does it hold up in a new angle?

Everyone knows Dust2. These days, you can play it across three separate official games, or as a thousand custom maps. You can play Dust2 in Minecraft. You can play the deconstructed remains of mankind’s last Dust2 server, Dustnet. In VR.

This latest interpretation comes courtesy of Mark Mocherad’s Polystrike, a Dota 2 mod that takes Counter-Strike‘s hectic gunfights and pulls the camera way, way up. The mod is currently very early in development but already looks rather neat.

From Long-A to those infuriating doors, everything you know about Dust2 is there, viewed through the eyes of some sadistic pigeon.



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Already it’s clear the perspective provides more than a change of view. With shorter sniper lanes, pushing mid isn’t the death sentence it can so often be. Meanwhile, it looks like you’ll be able to soak up more bullets than its first-person counterpart. All this is likely to change as the mod develops, but it’s certainly one to keep an eye on.

Dota 2’s workshop tools have been out for a few years, but it’s largely felt maligned. Feel free to prove me wrong, but most folk seen content to recreate mods from Dota’s Warcraft 3 heyday or slap together a variation of the base game with no cooldowns. It’s rarely felt like the game’s potential has been tapped as creatively as past Valve games.

(Fine: I’ll admit a few people liked Auto Chess.)

Mocherad claims Polystrike will be free to download later this year. For now, you can chuck a few quid over on his Patreon to gain immediate access.