I think I’m beginning to sour on roguelikes.
Roguelike used to be so niche a term, and so interesting a genre, but now it just seems like a relatively cheap way to turn a 3 hour game into a 15 hour game without having to do much of anything.
There are great roguelikes: Binding of Isaac and Vampire Survivors. There are good ones: Dead Cells and Nuclear Throne. And then there is whatever incrementally lower tier that we now decide Despot’s Game happens to be a part of. “Okay”, I guess.
Auto-Battle Your Life Away
Despot’s Game is an 11 level game, with 10 classes that each of your nameless drones can speck into. All of the levels look the same (so much so that I wonder if it’s supposed to be a commentary on the fact that your lemmings have been put in this mindless, endless death game by a rogue AI) and there is a great deal of overlap in these classes which makes it feel more like 6.
You get dropped in and are made to go between rectangular rooms in which you will either complete a ‘quest’, partake in some admittedly humorous dialogue with an npc, buy items/ weapons/ units at the shop, sacrifice your units for food, or just straight up buy food.
The Problems
The game is an auto-battler, so once you’ve set up your formation and decked out your units, they go off on their own whenever they enter a fight, with a fight being present in all non-shop/ dialogue rooms.
The strategy here comes in both how you upgrade your units as well as how they are placed in the arena. You can select individual units and place them wherever you want (on your side of the battlefield at least). Something which sounds very fun; however, perhaps to mitigate the inevitable frustration with using a cursor on consoles, there’s also an auto-sort function. Aside from variety, there is never a reason not to use this function.
Upgrading has an issue as well, as EVERYTHING in the game is bought with a single currency: coins. This was likely done to force you to make difficult decisions, but once you understand the game’s classes, upgrade paths, and reward structure (something which takes all of 3 hours), you typically just get bottlenecked into one of a handful of strategies.
Sure, you can switch this up for the sake of variety, but there’s never a reason to do so. There are no unlockables, and nothing carries over between playthroughs, so in all earnestness, what is the point? These sorts of games typically keep from becoming stale by offering both immediate progression and long-term progression, with certain things either being unlocked which may not be immediately useful, but which will certainly help future runs. This game was seemingly built as a single run sort of experience, as there is nothing that I can find which carries over between runs. This means that, should you come up against some bad shop luck late into a run, or be stuck for 2 coins in order to get a small, yet battle shifting, upgrade, then this is just a dead run. There is not consolation waiting for you.
And you may ask, well should there be? After all, none of these games promise to be easy, or to get steadily easier, and much of the fun comes from learning a game’s systems and overcoming them. I’d agree with this, but there’s almost nothing to learn here. There are no secrets, there are few strategies, there are few jokes, and there is little fun.
The Biggest Problem(s)
I mentioned food a while back and you might be wondering what that does. This was the thing that turned me from giving the game the benefit if the doubt to being entirely, unshakably ambivalent towards it.
You have a certain amount of food at the beginning of every run. Every time you move to a different screen, you consume 1 food times the number of units you have. If you don’t have enough food to feed all of your units, then they go hungry and enter battle with 30% of their health knocked off. This one idea murders any semblance of exploration, and further funnels every run into the single play-style of: find shop, b-line to boss, next stage, next shop etc.
Aside from the single player there are also challenges. These modes are akin to the sorts of challenges they present you with in chess games, in that there is almost always only one way to solve them. I’m sure there are a plurality of people who enjoy this, but in a game with this much railroading, the last thing I want is to be corralled even more so.
There is also a pseudo-PVP mode where you can battle with armies that other players have beaten the game with. I have nothing else to say about it as it does exactly what it says on the tin and is, to me, almost not worth mentioning. Sure, this could lead to you discovering new ways to beat the game based upon certain team compositions, but with nothing to unlock, there’s really no point, unless you just really want to chase down the top leaderboard rank, or watch even more auto-battling in a small, rectangular room.
Anything Else?
As I’m sure you can tell from the screenshots, the game has an admittedly clean, albeit utilitarian and somewhat boring art style. This game’s visuals are complimented in kind by its very bland, yet serviceable dystopian synth soundtrack.
As I’m sure you can tell, auto-battlers never really appealed to me beyond the absurd likes of TABS or the ramping insanity of Vampire Survivors. Problem being, all of those games have things you can do in them. In TABS, you can take control of any individual unit and feel as though you’re in this absurd fight you’ve engaged, and in Vampire Survivors, you still have to move and make snap decisions even though all of your attacks are automatic.
Unless you really love comparing your run against the runs of others online, or just really love opaque challenges, I can think of no reason why I would ever recommend this over either of those games.
