Despot's Game: Dystopian Army Builder

by Aethyna Oct 20, 2021 | 1 Votes | 70 Played | 0 Reviews

10 rate

Genres:

Strategy , Auto Battler/ Autochess

Graphics:

Labels:

Roguelike/roguelite , Party-Based

Platforms:

Publishers:

tinyBuild Despot’s Game is a whimsical roguelike with an auto-battler-style combat and a pretty strategic gameplay where you “recruit” puny humans and equip them with various weapons. Take on the many enemies the arena dungeon has to offer all in hopes of taking the fight to the maniacal talking computer screen that hosts the game show. Play Now Similar Games

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Summary Plotline Gameplay Community Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

Despot’s Game is a whimsical roguelike with an auto-battler-style combat and a pretty strategic gameplay. In this game, you’ve found yourself in the middle of a battle-to-the-death contest organized by a maniacal talking computer screen. Luckily, you won’t be partaking in the battles yourself. Instead, you “recruit” puny humans and equip them with various weapons so they could survive enemy encounters and descend deeper to the next level where tougher enemies reside. There are boss fights, numerous strategic ways to upgrade your “unwilling gladiators” and to produce more food to feed your army, and funny encounters with the denizens of the arena dungeon you’re in.

Plotline

There’s no real storyline here. The game just puts you in an arena run by a talking and flying computer screen and expects you to go through all the levels of the arena dungeon to defeat the screen just because it has a bad attitude.

Gameplay

Despot’s Game comes with many game modes, some of which can only be unlocked after certain requirements are met. For instance, to unlock the “Eazy Mode”, you’ll need to fail your run 3 times in a row first.

You’ll even get to choose your starter group. Besides the Classic group makeup, you can choose specially themed groups such as Medieval or Sportspeople. Similar to game modes, you’ll need to unlock these groups first by fulfilling certain criteria. However, unlike game modes, anything you unlock will stay unlocked even if you log out of the game.

Since the game is essentially an auto-battler and a roguelike/dungeon crawler, it’s a fairly easy game to jump into. That being said, if you don’t have any experience with any of the aforementioned genres, know that the game also comes with a helpful tutorial which explains how the game works.

By the way, don’t listen to the floating computer screen when it says to add more puny humans to your team – they cost tokens, which you could have saved for something better; and they will consume more food per movement. In fact, as a rule of thumb, never trust anything a villain says.

Despite being an easy game to grasp, Despot’s Game can be quite challenging as well. The challenge here comes in the form of resource management, upgrades, and your party’s makeup, for example, which types of units you have.

You see, there are many different types of weapons available in the game. Some are ranged and some are melee. Besides coming in different grades/quality as well, there’s a weapons combo system that makes equipping your people with weapons from the same weapon group but different types incredibly advantageous mainly because they will get a very nice boost to their abilities. In fact, you’ll do well to make use of this system if you want to keep upkeep to the minimum while maximizing the efficiency of your army.

In this game, you’ll have to keep your puny humans fed too. After all, an army marches on its stomach. You can buy food with tokens at food shops, or you can sacrifice a human from your team to generate some – hey, meat is still meat!

This is much better than the alternative which is letting them starve. If they starve, they’ll suffer a significant penalty during combat. Food will only be consumed whenever you make your army move from one room to the other. Unless you have a whole lot of food stashed, it would be a bad idea to backtrack too much. Thankfully, some of the rooms have a teleportation device that allows you to quickly move your army, at no food cost, to another teleportation room of your choice.

In terms of upgrades, your people will gain experience with every fight they’re in and will eventually level up, bolstering their stats. There’s also this mutation system that works much like a “talent tree” where you can spend tokens that you get from completing a battle on permanent mutations that will help your army. From time to time, you may even get free mutations from a room you’ve cleared. Simply check the minimap to know which type of room you’re in – the rooms come with helpful icons, after all.

Every level of the dungeon will have a boss level that you’ll have to complete in order to descend to the next level. There are also encounters where you’ll be given a specific quest to complete. These quests are entirely optional but they can be very rewarding if you do manage to complete them – the “lots of free tokens”-kind of reward. Every new level will kick off an encounter as well where you might be able to get your hands on something nice for free.

Community

Despot’s Game is a single-player game through and through. However, if you’re interested to connect with the game’s community, its Steam page would likely be the best place to head to.

Graphics/ Sound

The game features gorgeous albeit “dark and dreary” pixel graphics – it’s supposed to be a dungeon - and really cool animations. The humans are incredibly adorable due to how “puny” they are. In terms of music, if you’re into retro electro music or even synth-wave, you’ll definitely love the soundtrack here.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, Despot’s Game is a brilliantly made and designed auto-battler/roguelike game that oozes humor by the bucketload. The gameplay is both fun and strategic, and would definitely be able to scratch the itch of any fan of roguelikes.

New Game Added: Despot's Game: Dystopian Army Builder

by Aethyna Oct 20, 2021

Despot’s Game is a whimsical roguelike with an auto-battler-style combat and a pretty strategic gameplay where you “recruit” puny humans and equip them with various weapons. Take on the many enemies the arena dungeon has to offer all in hopes of taking the fight to the maniacal talking computer screen that hosts the game show.