Synopsis:
Guide puny humans through Despot’s Game – a rogue-like tactics army battler. Equip your team and sacrifice them through procedural dungeons as you fight enemies, and other players!

Reviewed on: PC (Intel i5-9400F, @2.90GHZ, RTX 2060, 16GB RAM)
Also available for: N/A

Developer: Konfa Games
Publisher: Tiny Build

Endless, procedurally generated dungeons are hardly new fare when it comes to roguelike games. Despot’s Game: Dystopian Army Builder stands out from the crowd because instead of being the lowly single warrior working your way through the endlessness, you are a General developing an army to defeat the randomised masses. Blending the roguelike nature with army management and auto battling, Despot’s Game has been released by developer Konya Games into an enjoyable and very playable Early Access state.

The concept of Despot’s Game is fairly simple: build your army, tactically place individual units around and engage whatever ungodly creatures inhabit the current room. The unit placement is the main tactical impact you have on combat during a run. Improving your tactics is mainly achieved through experimentation, but other than a few exceptions, it seems that the accepted convention of swords in front and bows up the back will be typically what players fall back on. The exceptions can include grouping your cultists together so that they begin summoning a tentacle monster immediately when a fight commences, instead of having to group up before the summon, saving precious seconds. A handy auto-placement button exists and is a very easy way to ignore the placement system and focus on the army management side; this is the system I enjoyed the most in the game.

As mentioned, you have your RPG class favourites, healers, damager dealers and tanks. The most variety comes in the damage dealers, having a number of different classes between melee and ranged variants. All of your humans start as little pink ‘Newbies’ until they are given a single piece of gear, which defines their health, damage, attack and other stats. Higher-level equipment is available as you upgrade the shop, which will in turn progress the strength of your humans. Gearing out your army with multiple humans in different gear from the same class gives that class a special ability once you hit 3 unique units. For some, like the Cultists, this ability allows them to summon a tentacle monster, whereas others, like the Thrower, gain a special damage ability that will proc every few seconds, in this case, a bomb. These special abilities are powerful and well worth stacking your army with overall fewer classes to ensure you have enough to make them available.

Currently, my only qualm with the army management system is that it still feels vital to have healers and tanks in your army, requiring a fair bit of luck and resources to develop an army without these staples. In practice, it has meant that you are often taking the strong healing and tanking gear offered in the shop, limiting the creativity Konfa Games is seeking.

Each piece of gear makes the human visually distinct, and higher-level gear is sometimes logical and sometimes humorous improvements. The Tanks start with shields, but then higher-level gear includes fridges and tables, while the Fencers (swordsmen) start with simple swords, but the better gear includes lightsaber and a buster sword, which, when equipped, makes the human stand in a very Cloud Strife-esque manner.

All of which leads me to another unexpected but welcome component of Despot’s Game, the writing and humour. The random events that spawn are written well with a humorous edge, though at the current time, there is a lot of repetition in these events. Since one of the random events is with a narrative designer that, depending on your dialogue choices, will direct you to an email to submit a potential encounter, I might need to put my money where my mouth is. Whilst always very humorous and light-hearted, Despot’s Game is also filled with pop culture references. Once equipped with gear, humans take on titles and names that are often related to something; I have had a few Skywalkers in my playthroughs so far.

Management is completed not only in your army composition but also in the management of resources. Purchasing items, food, humans, gear and upgrades are all managed through a single currency, which means that every purchase you make will impact progress in other areas. Early on in my runs, I was hoarding food so that I wasn’t victim to the 30% debuff that occurs when your army starves. Therefore I was never receiving the army-wide buffs to health and mana and was rarely able to access the higher cost and stronger soldiers. The single currency system means that through many runs, you are balancing a fine line of progression. This can become especially tight as it only takes a few fights to whittle down your army; no matter how strong your army, you should always be looking for ways to improve it. Despot’s Game teaches you to walk a tightrope if you want to explore the different progression avenues in a single run.

Despot’s Game has launched in a strong state, with a good amount of content to keep you busy fighting your way out of the dungeons. It is definitely worth checking out if you are in the mood for a tactical auto battling roguelike. The promises of more content over the coming year developers Konfa Games aim to keep Despot’s Game: Dystopian Army Builder in early access is an exciting prospect.

(Despot’s Game code provided for review)