I am consistently impressed when studios riff off of other popular genres and manage to make interesting games. Despot’s Game is a roguelike auto-battler with no multiplayer elements whatsoever. Instead, your small army will be battling its way through a series of randomly generated rooms, not unlike Smash TV or Binding of Isaac. As you battle your way through Despot’s Game you’ll come across small enemies, large enemies, boss rooms before you get to the next level, food rooms, teleporter rooms, shops, and more. All the while you’ll need to keep your army fed, healed, and concentrated.
If you’ve never played an auto-battler before it’s a fairly simple concept. You pick and choose characters to place on a grid, you and your enemy enter a room, and the teams fight until there’s a victor. What I enjoyed about Despot’s Game was the setting. The auto-battlers I’ve played have mostly used characters from other intellectual properties and relied on them to make the game interesting. Despot’s Game has you controlling a pack of useless humans until you give them something that makes them stand out. You’re only allowed one piece of gear per human but that piece of gear determines their class and adds to their class count.
Classes vary and there are quite a few of them. All humans start as newbies with nothing remarkable about them but the gear you give them will give them powers. Some of the classes are very traditional with fighters, tanks, and mages that all have interesting powers attributed to them. Depending on how many fencers you have in your party, you can increase their critical hit chance. Once you acquire 3 tanks they’re able to use the ‘taunt’ ability. But what makes Despot’s Game so interesting is when you venture off the beaten path. If you have 3 cultists in your party, they sit in the back and summon a tentacle of Cthulu that runs around smacking your enemies. The combos you can create in this game seem truly excellent. With so many different classes to choose from some of the combos should be downright intense based on the various fights you can get into.
Artistically, Despot’s Game is going for a simple and older style of pixel art. Each piece of gear is represented on the person it’s equipped to, giving each human a specific identity based on what they’re wearing. Because the gear has a physical representation on each human, some gear even changes a small single-space character into a large four-space character requiring four squares on the grid instead of one. This is an example of the art playing a larger role in the gameplay, having gear represented by extra spaces taken plays into the strategy. The UI is very clean and represents everything you need to know while navigating around Despot’s Game. The only thing I would have liked to have added is a key for the map. It took me a while to realize the difference between a teleporter room and a shop, but once I recognized the icons for what they were by looking at them before battling in them, it clicked and became a non-issue.
I thought having a large army would simplify some of the battles I was getting into. After all, how could overwhelming your enemy in sheer force be a bad thing? Despot’s Game may treat humans like they’re disposable but if there’s one thing it expects from you it is to keep your armies fed and luckily, there are rooms that sell food to you, at great expense. Your army gets real hungry too. There’s a bar that represents your army’s hunger and every time you traverse into another room, they get a little hungrier. With a large army, they chew through food very quickly. Worse, even if you enter a room you’ve already cleared, they still get hungry. Choose your moves carefully, enemies aren’t the only thing that can kill your troops. Hungry troops won’t perform as well and if they’re in the red, can barely move. If you find yourself in truly dire straits, every room has a sacrifice pit. One human for one piece of food. Be careful though, your sacrifice won’t give their equipment back once they’re dead.
There are also fun little rooms that give a small story and a quest. I was tasked with collecting the T-virus and returning it to a doctor. After fighting in the room with the T-virus, one of my men contracted the virus and was killed. Despite being promised 30 tokens for returning the T-virus, the doctor was merely annoyed that I wasn’t able to retrieve it and offered nothing for my man’s sacrifice. I was not happy. You’ll also occasionally run into rooms that offer modifiers. There are two types of modifiers, ones you buy that act more like a talent tree with progression tied to abilities and the ability to upgrade each modifier. And there are modifiers you find on the field. The ones you buy are static. They’ll be there every game but the ones you find on the field are random and can allow for some explosive combos. My first team was mage-heavy so I was picking up modifiers that would improve mage attack speed and allow them to deal excessive damage.
I can see myself returning to Despot’s Game over and over. The gameplay loop was very enjoyable and trying out new class combos and modifiers gives me ideas for armies even when I’m not playing the game. Despot’s Game has me highly anticipating its release sometime this year.
